strongtie.com Migration
Migrated strongtie.com from external vendors back to the internal team — a Next.js framework upgrade, server-side rendering for SEO, and a headless Bloomreach CMS pipeline.
The brief
strongtie.com was built and maintained by external vendors. Every change went through a contract, a queue and a hand-off, and the internal team had no way to move quickly on the company’s most visible property.
The brief was to bring it home: take ownership of the codebase, modernize it, and leave the internal team able to ship without a vendor in the loop.
Approach
The migration ran on three tracks in parallel.
- Framework upgrade. Moved the site onto a current Next.js, clearing the accumulated version debt that had made dependency updates risky.
- Server-side rendering. Introduced SSR so the marketing site’s content is crawlable and fast on first paint, rather than depending on client-side hydration for its primary content.
- Headless CMS pipeline. The site’s content runs on Bloomreach, a headless CMS. I reworked how the Next.js front end consumes it so editors could work in Bloomreach without an engineer, and content changes stopped requiring a deploy.
Alongside the rebuild, I worked content-heavy sections of the site by hand as they moved into the new CMS. The clearest example was the technical-notes product pages, where engineering reference data had been rendering as loose, unaligned values. I gave that content real structured HTML tables and standardized how product imagery was presented — centered, on a consistent white background — working from the marketing team’s requirements so the reference material read cleanly across the catalog.
Results
The site now lives with the internal team. Framework and rendering decisions are made by people who own the outcome, deploys are routine rather than contractual, and the SEO position that depended on the vendor relationship is back under our control.
