Migrating to Next.js Is a Content Problem Wearing a Framework Costume

Routing, templating, build tooling — these translate fairly directly from most legacy static-site generators, and a competent team can usually get a working shell of the new site running in days. What takes weeks is discovering everything the old system did implicitly: URL redirects nobody remembered existed, content transformations baked into a template nobody's touched in years, edge cases in how a handful of pages were special-cased.

The redirects in particular are the kind of thing that's invisible until it breaks — every inbound link and every search-engine ranking pointing at the old URL structure depends on them, and migrating without auditing them first is the most common way a content migration quietly costs a site its search traffic.

The migrations that go smoothly tend to start with an inventory, not a rewrite — cataloguing what the old system actually does, including the parts nobody remembers deciding, before writing a line of the new one.