Next.js / Headless Developer Needed – SEO-Safe Migration of Established WordPress Website

Expert - Est. Budget: $2,500 We are looking for an experienced developer to rebuild and modernize Club Bookers, an established nightlife and club-booking website: ⁠Club Bookers The website has been online for many years and already has a significant amount of content, indexed pages, city pages, venue pages and existing organic search traffic. This is NOT a project to create a new website from scratch. The main objective is to replace the existing WordPress setup with a modern, extremely fast and SEO-friendly architecture without losing the existing SEO value, URLs, content or site structure. For technical/content inspiration, please review: ⁠London Night Guide We particularly like the idea of making nightlife information highly structured and easily understandable by Google, AI search engines and LLMs. We are not looking to copy their visual design. What we want We want to migrate Club Bookers away from WordPress to a modern stack, ideally something such as Next.js + a lightweight/headless CMS. The new website should: * Be extremely fast and optimized for Core Web Vitals * Preserve existing URLs wherever possible * Preserve existing content and important on-page SEO * Preserve/improve the existing internal linking structure * Be fully responsive * Have clean server-rendered/static HTML * Include correct canonical tags, metadata, sitemap.xml and robots.txt * Implement appropriate structured data / Schema.org markup * Have structured data models for cities, clubs/venues and potentially events * Be optimized for both traditional SEO and modern AI/LLM discovery * Make content easy to maintain and update without a developer * Include proper analytics/tracking * Maintain all important booking/contact functionality We are also interested in creating a more machine-readable content architecture where appropriate, potentially including structured JSON, Markdown representations, llms.txt and/or a simple public data layer/API. An AI nightlife concierge/chat interface may eventually be added, but the priority of this project is the underlying architecture, speed, structured content and SEO-safe migration. SEO migration is critical This is the most important requirement. Before development/migration, we expect a complete crawl/inventory of the existing website. Existing URLs, titles, H1s, canonical tags, indexability, internal links and relevant content should be documented before migration and checked again before launch. We do not want hundreds of URLs changed unnecessarily or existing content blindly rewritten with AI. Where a URL genuinely needs to change, proper 301 redirects must be implemented. The objective is: Keep the existing SEO asset → improve the technology underneath it. Design We want the website to feel significantly more modern, premium and clean, but this is primarily a development + technical SEO project, not a large branding exercise. The existing content can largely remain. We are open to improving page templates, navigation, UX and conversion elements while keeping the underlying information architecture recognizable. Ideal candidate You should have strong experience with: Next.js / React Headless CMS architecture WordPress migrations Technical SEO Schema.org / JSON-LD Core Web Vitals Large content-driven websites Server-side rendering / static generation Redirect mapping and SEO-safe migrations Experience with AI search / GEO / AEO / LLM-readable websites is a strong plus. Budget Target budget: approximately €3,000 We understand that the exact scope may need to be adjusted to fit this budget. We would therefore prefer someone who can identify the highest-impact improvements rather than over-engineering the project. If necessary, the project can be divided into phases. Timeline Ideally 3–5 weeks. Quality and preservation of existing SEO are more important than rushing the launch. When applying Please don’t send a generic proposal. Start your application with “CLUBBOOKERS” and briefly answer these four questions: 1. What tech stack would you recommend for this migration, and why? 2. How would you ensure we don’t lose existing organic rankings during the migration? 3. Have you previously migrated an established SEO website away from WordPress? Please show examples. 4. What would you realistically deliver within a budget of approximately €3,000? We are specifically looking for someone who understands that rebuilding an established SEO website is very different from building a new website.