Case Study
SEO Growth Against All Odds
JavaScript migrations can do major damage. We helped Eater skip the dip, turning a new CMS and frontend into an SEO win.
Overcoming risks with strategic resilience
This was more than a move to a headless CMS or a migration to a NextJS frontend. It was a high-pressure test of whether our small team could protect and grow a major publisher’s visibility, despite a risky change amid industry-wide upheaval.
By acting fast, monitoring closely, and amplifying breakout moments, we kept Eater’s organic traffic steady, boosted engagement, and made sure their audience could still find them when it mattered.
Impact
Results you can sink your teeth into
Successfully migrated 600k+ URLs across 31 sites
+30% organic click-through rate 30 days post-migration
+2% clicks 30 days post-migration
Challenges
A tall order
Eater is one of the most recognized food and dining publications in the U.S. On June 10, 2025, it migrated a network of 31 sites to headless Wordpress with NextJS frontend.
The scale was huge.
600k+ URLs across 31 individual sites.
The stakes were high.
Prior to the migration Eater was driving hundreds of thousands of clicks off of several millions of search impressions monthly.
The challenge was steep.
Preserve Eater’s hard-earned search equity in the face of three major disruptions.
Challenge #1: The migration
Traditionally, moving from server-side rendering (SSR) to a JavaScript frontend means losing 30+% of traffic. A migration of this scale puts years of accumulated organic equity in jeopardy, including the risk of significant traffic and revenue loss.
Challenge #2: Google core update
To complicate an already complex migration, Google rolled out its second core algorithm update of 2025 on June 30, two weeks after the migration. That meant even more traffic volatility and a real test that would rapidly reveal what the migration would mean for future performance.
Challenge #3: AI-driven search volatility
Let’s be honest: The search landscape was already hard enough to navigate without a migration. Some users were moving their inquiries to generative engines. Meanwhile, many sites were seeing organic clicks plummet, as Google expanded AI overviews on SERPs for informational queries.
Client Feedback
We'll toast to that
Gray Dot was an invaluable resource across Vox Media brands. They are not only deeply knowledgeable about all aspects of SEO, from content strategy to data analysis to technical implementations and best practices, but they’re also thoughtful, collaborative, and simply good people.
Whenever Sam or Tory were supporting us on a project, we knew we were in brilliant, trusted hands. I can’t recommend Gray Dot enough!
Alexia LaFata · Senior Manager of SEO, Vox Media
Migrations at the scale of Eater and SB Nation aren’t just technical projects, they’re moments where years of earned search equity are on the line. Gray Dot brought deep JavaScript SEO expertise, strong planning discipline, and a steady, responsive partnership throughout some of the most complex launches we’ve done.
Their ability to anticipate risk, monitor performance in real time, and act quickly when conditions changed was critical to maintaining stability and setting these platforms up for long-term success.
Thomas Stang · Principal Software Engineer, Vox Media
Strategy & execution
Our recipe for success
01
Create a comprehensive plan.
A resilient plan does two things: protect performance and preserve (or better yet, improve) technical integrity.
Our team’s deep JavaScript SEO expertise put the site on solid technical footing with a playbook for making the headless CMS and JS front-end play nice with SEO. We also ran JavaScript audits pre-release to find any issues before they reached production.
To protect performance, we took a prioritized approach to URL mapping that helped avoid dips and support the pages users rely on most.
02
Monitor, support, & respond on the fly.
The truth of any migration is you can’t anticipate everything that comes after you hit the button. But you can make all the difference by spotting patterns fast and responding just as quickly.
Our daily analysis of GSC data allowed the project team to rapidly detect & resolve technical issues. Meanwhile, we identified loss leaders and evergreen guides needing optimization in the new CMS framework, so that no piece of content was left behind.
03
Seize opportunities to stabilize the baseline.
A wait-and-pray approach isn’t just anxiety inducing, it also costs the site. Instead, we actively looked for opportunities to drive traffic, sending a clear message to search engines that Eater and its content were still very much in high demand.
Most notably, our rapid amplification of the James Beard Awards coverage on June 16 generated 30,000 clicks in one day, buoying overall web performance and offsetting expected volatility.
