The Context

May 2021. Proactive For Her was running on Razzle.js with Bootstrap styling, and it was about as pleasant as it sounds. For the uninitiated, Razzle was supposed to be "universal JavaScript applications with no configuration." In practice, it was universal pain with plenty of configuration headaches.

Our healthcare platform was suffering from the classic startup tech debt trilogy: slow performance, runtime errors everywhere, and SEO that made Google pretend we didn't exist. The cherry on top? A team of junior developers trying to ship features on a framework that fought them at every turn.

The blog was hemorrhaging organic traffic, landing pages took forever to load, and every deploy felt like Russian roulette. Something had to give.

The Problem

Our Razzle.js setup was failing on multiple fronts:

Performance was abysmal: Server-side rendering was inconsistent, client-side hydration was slow, and the build process took longer than a medical consultation. Pages that should have loaded in milliseconds were taking seconds.

Runtime errors were endemic: JavaScript without type safety plus junior developers equals production bugs. The classic Cannot read property 'title' of undefined was basically our application's tagline.

SEO was non-existent: Healthcare content lives and dies by organic search. Pregnant women googling "PCOS symptoms" weren't finding us because our meta tags were broken and our content wasn't being indexed properly.

Developer experience was miserable: Hot reloading was unreliable, debugging was archaeological work, and onboarding new developers meant weeks of "well, this is how Razzle works" explanations.

The breaking point came when we needed to revamp our blog for SEO purposes. The existing Razzle setup made content-heavy pages perform so poorly that we were actively losing potential patients to competitors with basic WordPress sites.

The Solution

Strategic Migration Approach

Start with the highest-impact, lowest-risk area: the blog. Healthcare content needs organic traffic, and blog migration wouldn't affect core user flows.

// New Next.js blog structure
// pages/blog/[slug].tsx
export async function getStaticPaths() {
  const posts = await strapi.find('articles')
  return {
    paths: posts.map(post => ({ params: { slug: post.slug }})),
    fallback: 'blocking'
  }
}

TypeScript Integration from Day One

Since we were rebuilding anyway, introduce type safety from the ground up rather than retrofitting later.

// Core healthcare domain types
interface LabTest {
  id: string
  name: string
  description: string
  categories: TestCategory[]
  price: number
  preparationInstructions?: string
  resultTimeframe: string
}

Development Infrastructure Setup

Establish conventions and tooling that would prevent the chaos that plagued our Razzle codebase.

Created comprehensive development guidelines with examples, established code review standards, and built tooling that enforced consistency.

The Impact

Performance transformation: Blog page load times dropped from 3-4 seconds to under 1 second. Core Web Vitals scores improved dramatically, and mobile performance became competitive.

Runtime error elimination: TypeScript caught entire categories of bugs at compile time. Production errors dropped by approximately 80% in the migrated portions of the application.

SEO revival: Organic blog traffic increased significantly within 3 months of migration. Healthcare content started ranking for competitive keywords that were previously invisible to search engines.

Developer velocity: After initial learning curve, feature development accelerated. New team members could contribute meaningfully within weeks instead of months.

The most valuable outcome was cultural: the team gained confidence to tackle complex features. When your foundation is solid, you can build more ambitious solutions.

What we learned is that framework migrations aren't just technical decisions—they're team enablement decisions. The right tools don't just make code better; they make developers better.

Sometimes you have to burn the village to save it. In our case, abandoning Razzle.js wasn't just about performance—it was about creating a platform that could grow with our healthcare mission.