Moving the blog to Next.js without losing the traffic.
A blog carrying real acquisition weight
The Hims & Hers blog is a top-of-funnel engine, not a side project. It ran on an ageing stack, it was slow on mobile, and every change we wanted to make carried the risk of losing organic traffic the company had spent years earning. The mandate was to modernise the whole thing without a single ranking regression, which is a narrower target than it sounds.
Front-end lead on the migration
I helped spearhead the move to Next.js. That meant mapping a rendering strategy for each template rather than picking one and hoping, defining the component layer the content team would live in, and working closely with content and SEO so that URL structure, metadata and structured data all survived the cutover intact.
Migrate by template, measure every step
We moved template by template instead of attempting a single cutover, and everything shipped behind measurement. Lab traces plus field data meant a regression surfaced in hours rather than weeks. Article pages got tuned hardest, since that is where the traffic actually lands: image strategy, font loading, and cutting the client JavaScript that was not earning its bytes.
Components the storefront kept
The component layer we built for the migration did not stay in the blog. It became a set of shared building blocks used across marketing and commerce, and that is where most of the compounding value ended up. The migration was the visible part. The vocabulary it left behind mattered more.