Infrastructure Systems
Mic Headless Multilingual Infrastructure.
Rebuilding a public health consulting firm's digital presence as structured, SEO-optimized multilingual infrastructure with headless architecture.
System architecture.
How it's built.
Engineering process.
How it was built.
- Crawled existing site: cataloged 400+ pages
- SEO audit: documented 200+ technical issues
- Created migration plan: content mapping, URL redirects
Content inventory, technical spec, redirect map
- Set up Next.js with TypeScript
- Configured WordPress REST API endpoints
- Designed URL structure for 2 languages (EN, FR)
Working dev environment, API integration
- Built page templates (home, about, services, projects, contact)
- Implemented multilingual routing
- Integrated WordPress content via API
Functional frontend with dynamic content
- Generated JSON-LD schemas (Organization, Article, BreadcrumbList)
- Implemented hreflang tags across all pages
- Created dynamic XML sitemaps per language
- Built robots.txt with proper directives
Complete SEO infrastructure
- Content migration from old WordPress to headless
- Implemented 301 redirects (all old URLs preserved)
- Performance optimization (images, code splitting)
- Soft launch → monitoring → full launch
Live production site with zero downtime
Engineering challenges.
What broke. How we fixed it.
WordPress REST API Performance
Fetching 100+ posts via REST API took 4–8 seconds per page load.
Cannot migrate away from WordPress (client team trained on it). Shared hosting limits query speed.
ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration) with 60-second revalidation. Custom WordPress endpoint returning only required fields (payload -70%). Redis caching on Vercel.
Page load: 5.2s → 1.8s. TTFB: <200ms. Admin experience unchanged.
Multilingual URL Structure Conflicts
Two languages (EN, FR) required clean URL structures (/en/about, /fr/a-propos) with automatic locale detection and redirects. Mismatched routes caused 404s and broken canonical chains.
Next.js i18n routing doesn't automatically handle slug translation between languages. Canonical URLs needed to be language-specific without duplicate content penalties.
Built custom middleware for locale detection and redirect logic. Created per-language slug maps for translated routes. Automated canonical and alternate link generation per page.
Zero 404s post-migration. Hreflang errors: 0. Canonical chains correct across all languages.
Hreflang at Scale
400+ pages × 2 languages (EN, FR) = 800+ hreflang tags. Google Search Console flagged missing alternates.
Different URL structures per language (/en/about vs /fr/a-propos). Manual implementation for 800+ tags not viable.
Dynamic hreflang generator mapping content IDs across languages. Middleware auto-generates alternates per route. Fallback logic for untranslated pages.
Hreflang errors: zero. International indexing: correct per language. 100% automated.
Measured impact.
Results. Numbers only.
Performance
Page load: 5.2s → 1.8s (65% faster)
Lighthouse performance: 45 → 92
Lighthouse SEO: 67 → 100
TTFB: 800ms → 180ms
LCP: 4.8s → 1.6s
SEO
Structured data coverage: 0% → 100%
Search Console errors: 400+ → 0
Indexed pages: 180 → 420
Organic traffic: +120% in 6 months
Technical
Code bundle: 850KB → 180KB (78% reduction)
Mobile usability errors: 80+ → 0
Deployment time: 30 min manual → 2 min automated
Accessibility score: 72 → 95
Related.
Related systems.
Get started
Need similar architecture?
We build systems for operators serious about scale. If you're ready to invest in infrastructure that compounds, let's design your system.