NorthwindB2B SaaS

Rebuilding Northwind's platform for 3x faster growth

A complete redesign and headless rebuild that cut load time by 71% and lifted organic traffic past 240k monthly visits in nine months.

Service
Web Design + Build
Year
2025
Scope
Full Rebuild + SEO
Northwind platform homepage redesign on desktop

Overview

Northwind's legacy platform was slow, hard to update and invisible on search. We rebuilt it from the ground up — a new design system, a headless Next.js front end and a technical SEO foundation — so the team could ship faster and grow without friction.

  • Brand-aligned design system
  • Headless Next.js rebuild
  • Technical SEO foundation
  • Core Web Vitals optimization
  • Headless CMS integration
  • Analytics & event tracking

Challenge & Approach

The challenge

Northwind was growing fast but their product site was holding them back — slow, dated and impossible to update without an engineer.

  • 8s+ load times tanking conversions
  • No organic visibility on core terms
  • Marketing blocked by a rigid CMS
  • Inconsistent, off-brand UI patterns

Our approach

We rebuilt the front end as a fast headless app, gave marketing a flexible CMS, and engineered SEO into the foundation from day one.

  • Headless Next.js for sub-second loads
  • Composable design system in code
  • Editor-friendly headless CMS
  • Technical SEO and schema baked in

The Build

A product that feels as fast as it looks

Northwind marketing homepage

Homepage — sub-second first paint

The Results

Numbers that moved the business

0k/mo243k/mo
Organic traffic
+0%+68%
Conversion lift
0.03.4
Avg. position
099
Perf score

Organic traffic growth

Neon Lab engagement
M1M3M5M7M9

Keyword rankings

headless cms platform#38#2+36
b2b saas analytics#27#4+23
team workflow software#51#6+45
product onboarding tool#44#3+41
Before and after performance comparison
MetricBeforeAfterChange
Organic traffic / mo31k243k+684%
Largest Contentful Paint8.2s0.9s-89%
Conversion rate1.4%2.35%+68%
Indexed pages4121,920+366%
Mara Quinn, Lead EngineerMara Quinn18/09/2025SaaS
Northwind redesigned dashboard interface

Starting from the data

Before touching a single component, we audited Core Web Vitals, crawl coverage and the conversion funnel. The picture was clear: speed and structure were the two levers that mattered most.

We mapped every template to a performance budget and set a hard ceiling for JavaScript shipped per route.

A design system in code

The new visual language lives as composable components, not a static mockup. Designers and engineers share one source of truth, so shipping a new page is a matter of assembling tested blocks.

The team went from a two-week release cycle to shipping daily — without filing engineering tickets.

Engineering for Core Web Vitals

Server components, edge caching and disciplined image handling brought Largest Contentful Paint under one second on key pages.

// Route-level performance budget
export const config = {
  maxJs: 90, // KB
  lcpTarget: 1000, // ms
};

SEO baked into the foundation

Structured data, clean information architecture and a fast crawl path meant Google could index the full catalog within days of launch — and rankings followed.

TagsNext.jsRedesignFaster LoadTop Rankings

Ready for results like these?

Tell us where you want to grow. We'll show you how design, engineering and SEO can get you there.