A Headless Next.js Build for One of the UK's Leading Search Agencies
A headless Next.js and WordPress build for Salience, Chester's award-winning search marketing agency.
Introducing
Salience
Industry
Digital Marketing
Services
Headless WordPress Development, Next.js Frontend, Performance Engineering
Website
salience.co.ukBuilt for an agency that holds everyone else to a high standard
Salience have been one of the UK's most respected search agencies since 2009. Award-winning, client-trusted and headquartered right here in Chester, they needed a website that matched the performance standards they demand of their own clients' brands. We built a headless Next.js and WordPress stack with ISR rendering, Motion.dev animations and a site-wide background colour transition that makes the experience unlike anything else in the agency space.
Next.js, built for speed from the ground up
The frontend is built in Next.js, one of the most capable frameworks available for performance-first web development. We combined this with Incremental Static Regeneration, which means every page is pre-rendered and served as a static file, then quietly revalidated in the background whenever content changes. Visitors never wait on a server. Pages load immediately, every time, while staying fully up to date without a manual rebuild.
WordPress on the backend. Familiar, flexible and fully decoupled.
Salience's team were already at home in WordPress, so we kept it as the content management layer. Decoupled from the frontend, WordPress handles all content creation through the familiar admin interface the team already knew, while Next.js handles everything the visitor sees. The result is a CMS that requires zero retraining and a frontend that is not constrained by WordPress's traditional rendering limitations.
Spring animations and a background transition effect built to be noticed
Motion.dev drives the micro-interactions and entrance animations throughout the site, with spring physics that feel considered and precise rather than generic fade-ins. The standout detail is the background colour transition: as you scroll through the site, the entire background shifts fluidly between colours to match the active section. There are no visible section breaks, no hard dividing lines, just a continuous and immersive reading experience that holds attention as you move through the page.
