Eldwick Law: Headless WordPress Migration for a Specialist Law Firm

The website needed to serve prospective clients researching high-value, cross-border legal matters while accommodating a large body of detailed content.

The project also required:

• A clear structure for services, jurisdictions and legal updates
• Continued use of WordPress by the firm's content editors
• Preservation of established URLs and search visibility
• Strong performance across mobile and desktop
• Reliable SEO metadata and structured data
• Accessible navigation through long-form legal content
• Privacy-conscious analytics and cookie consent

We separated the content-management and presentation layers.

WordPress remains the source of truth for pages, articles, team profiles, vacancies and specialist practice areas. The Next.js frontend retrieves and normalises this content through the WordPress REST API before presenting it within a fast, responsive interface.

This architecture gives editors control over content without restricting the design, performance or technical SEO of the public website.

Content architecture

The site brings together several WordPress content types within one coherent user journey. Visitors can explore the firm by service, jurisdiction or legal topic, browse team profiles, search legal updates and access dedicated compliance information. Dynamic routing allows this growing content library to retain a consistent structure without requiring individual templates for every page.

Long-form articles include:

• Search and topic filtering
• Automatic tables of contents
• Author information and contact options
• Related legal updates
• Expandable frequently asked questions
• Clear internal links to relevant services and team members

WordPress integration

The integration was designed around the firm's existing editorial workflow. Content from WordPress, ACF and Yoast SEO is transformed into typed, frontend-ready data. CMS URLs and legacy internal links are automatically rewritten for the public website, reducing the need to manually update older articles.

When content is published or amended, a secure webhook triggers targeted cache revalidation. This keeps pages fast while allowing updates to appear without a complete rebuild or deployment.

SEO and migration

Preserving organic visibility was a central part of the build. The website converts Yoast data into native Next.js metadata, including page titles, descriptions, canonical URLs and social-sharing information. It also generates relevant structured data for legal services, articles, people, breadcrumbs and FAQs.

A comprehensive redirect system maps legacy WordPress URLs to their new locations. Canonicals and internal links are normalised to prevent redirect chains, duplicate URLs and conflicting search signals.

Performance and accessibility

Most pages are statically generated and served from the edge, with JavaScript reserved for features that genuinely require interaction. Performance work included optimised image formats, critical CSS, reduced font payloads, deferred analytics and preloading of important visual assets.

The interface uses semantic HTML, logical heading structures, accessible navigation controls, keyboard-friendly interactions and descriptive labels throughout.

Consent-first analytics

Google Tag Manager was implemented with Consent Mode v2 and a default-deny configuration. Analytics scripts are only introduced after consent and are deferred to reduce their effect on initial page performance. This provides a more privacy-conscious implementation without compromising the firm's ability to understand website usage.

The finished platform gives Eldwick Law a faster and more flexible website while preserving the WordPress workflow its team already understands.

It provides a scalable foundation for legal services, thought leadership, recruitment and future content growth—supported by robust routing, controlled cache invalidation, structured data and migration-aware SEO.