We moved EmailOctopus to a headless platform, uniting two domains and giving their team total content control. The result is a flexible, high-performance site with consistently green Core Web Vitals.
Challenge
EmailOctopus was held back by a digital presence that couldn't keep pace with its product. Their marketing site, built on WordPress, suffered from an outdated design and a rigid CMS that created significant bottlenecks. The marketing team was entirely dependent on developers for content updates, stifling their ability to launch campaigns and adapt to market needs. The technical challenges were compounded by a fragmented architecture:
Disjointed User Experience: The marketing site (emailoctopus.com) and the web application (dashboard.emailoctopus.com) were two separate platforms, creating a confusing authentication flow for users.
Сontent Silos: The blog existed as a standalone entity, making it difficult to integrate content marketing efforts seamlessly into the main user journey.
Lack of Scalability: Simple operational needs, like granting limited access to freelance content creators, were impossible without complex workarounds, hindering the team's ability to scale content production.
The company needed to modernize its entire marketing platform—unifying the brand experience, empowering the marketing team, and building a technical foundation for performance and growth.
Solution
We replatformed the entire marketing presence to a headless architecture with Payload CMS and Next.js, focusing on a robust component library, seamless integrations, and a superior editorial experience.
We engineered a system that put the marketing and operations teams back in control:
1. Composable Page Architecture: We decomposed the new designs into 30+ reusable content blocks. This modular, visual page builder allows the marketing team to independently create, preview, and launch any page—from feature landing pages to complex competitor comparisons—without writing a single line of code.
2. Unified Platform & Seamless Authentication: We consolidated the marketing site and blog into a single Next.js application. To solve the cross-domain challenge, we engineered a shared authentication state, ensuring that when a user logs into the dashboard, the marketing site instantly reflects their status (e.g., changing "Login" to "Visit Dashboard") for a smooth, unified user experience.
3. Dynamic, Data-Driven Content: The new site goes beyond static pages. We implemented interactive elements managed directly in the CMS, including dynamic pricing calculators with multi-currency support and live, data-driven competitor comparison tables, turning the website into a powerful sales and marketing tool.
4. Granular Access Control & Editorial Governance: To support their content scaling strategy, we configured a custom "Freelancer" user role in Payload CMS. This role grants restricted access, allowing external contributors to create and edit specific pages safely without exposing critical site settings or other content collections.
Results in Numbers
400+
pages migrated from WordPress
4K+
images transferred, optimized, and restructured
0
developers needed for content updates
30+
composable blocks empowering marketing
100%
green Google PageSpeed scores across key pages
1
unified platform for marketing and blog
Before Migration vs After Migration
Outdated design and inflexible WordPress CMS dependent on developers.
Full marketing autonomy with a modern, visual page builder and 30+ components.
A disjointed user experience with two separate domains and a clunky login flow.
A single, unified platform with seamless cross-domain authentication.
Static content that was difficult to update or make interactive.
Dynamic, data-driven components like multi-currency pricing calculators managed in the CMS.
A single "editor" role, making it risky to onboard external help.
Secure, granular user roles allowing freelancers to contribute safely.
Inconsistent performance and a legacy tech stack limiting growth.
A high-performance, SEO-optimized site with consistently green Core Web Vitals.
Project Tech Stack
Payload CMS
Modern self-hosted headless CMS built with TypeScript and Node.js, offering full control over data structure, API, and business logic.
Next.JS
React framework for building fast, SEO-friendly web applications with server-side rendering and static site generation.
Neon database
Neon is a serverless Postgres platform designed to help you build reliable and scalable applications faster.
Vercel
A cloud platform for hosting and deploying frontend applications, built to work seamlessly with Next.js and modern frameworks.
Tailwind
CSS framework that lets you style websites quickly using utility classes instead of writing custom CSS.
How we work
Governed and Scalable, by Design
We design content models, editorial workflows, and governance into the architecture from day one to make you Information Architecture clean and usable as your team, markets, and channels grow.
Editorial UX boosts your marketing team's speed and freedom. They can build pages, launch campaigns, and manage content without needing developer help.
Performance & AI SEO by Default
Each project includes a complete SEO + LLM optimization. Performance baseline as standard: Core Web Vitals, structured data, rendering strategy, and AI SEO setup.
Scalable Next.js architecture derived from 7+ years of experience.
Already live? Our Next.js SEO audit gives you an actionable, dev-ready assessment of where you stand.
Predictable & Efficient Delivery
90% of our projects fit the initial budget. That comes from the time we invest upfront — understanding exactly what we're building before a single line of code is written.
Our CMS Kit has page builders, navigation, localization, content models, and SEO settings. It boosts every engagement. Plus, it won’t limit your choices. It's a smart starter refined across dozens of production deployments, not a constraint.
Key Features
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Dynamic Pricing & Calculators
Interactive, data-driven pricing tables and calculators with multi-currency support. All pricing logic is configurable directly from the CMS, enabling fast market experiments without code changes.
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4
Multi-Currency Support
Pricing adapts automatically based on user location, providing a localized experience across markets while maintaining a single, centralized configuration in the CMS.
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SEO-Safe Redirect Management
Custom redirect management built into the CMS, allowing teams to safely manage URL changes during and after the migration without risking SEO performance.
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High‑Performance Google PageSpeed Scores
Achieved consistently green Google PageSpeed metrics on desktop and mobile, with performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO all in the 90+ range for a fast, reliable user experience
What our client says
Jonathan Bull
We worked with FocusReactive to bring our website and blog into a single, modern setup that’s much easier for our team to manage. They rebuilt the pages based on our designs, migrated the blog to Payload CMS, and handled changes smoothly as the project evolved. Communication was quick and straightforward, and the end result is a flexible platform that will scale with us as our content and product grow.
