The Crazy Travel
A twelve-year, three-language travel blog moved off ageing WordPress to a fast, custom Next.js build — every ranking kept, 3–4× faster — with a hand-built interactive map of the entire 47,000 km journey as its centrepiece.
Before · WordPressAfter · Next.jsA map that flies as you scroll.
The standout of the rebuild is a custom, scroll-driven route map. A sticky Leaflet map flies leg by leg across the twelve-year, 47,000 km journey as you read — geotagged photos dropping onto the exact spot they were taken, across eight chapters and three languages. We hand-built the clustering, the antimeridian split and the photo pins; ~48,000 GPS points render smoothly client-side, with zero map-SaaS dependencies. No template does this.
The problem
Twelve years and 47,000 km of travel writing — in Spanish, English and Latvian — sat on a slow, ageing WordPress install: heavy pages, 8–14 second loads on mobile, a tangle of plugins, and a design that no longer did the work justice. The brief was deceptively hard — make it fast and genuinely beautiful, build the ambitious things WordPress never could, and don’t lose a single one of a decade’s hard-won Google rankings.
What we did
We rebuilt it from scratch as a custom Next.js site — a full redesign with lean navigation, instant search, a geotagged photo gallery, and the centrepiece: a bespoke, scroll-driven map of the whole journey, hand-built on Leaflet with no third-party map service. Every old permalink was mapped 1:1 with 301 redirects and verified before launch; the entire archive moved to clean Markdown that Pablo edits himself. None of it came from a template.
The result
Google PageSpeed climbed from the high-50s into the mid-90s on every page, loads got 3–4× faster, and page weight fell by up to 72% — while every URL kept its ranking and SEO scored 100 across the board. Google only noticed the site got faster. Readers got something else entirely: a quick, original, genuinely interactive home for the trip — owned outright, with no monthly platform fee and no lock-in.
More than a faster blog
This was never a brochure site. It’s a full publishing platform — header search across a decade of posts, a clustered photo map of 81 geotagged shots, a “where we’ve been” country map on the homepage, three languages from a single codebase, and the scroll-journey at its heart. The kind of build that proves custom doesn’t have to choose between fast and ambitious.
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