Next.js or WordPress for a Quebec company (and when you need both)

Pick the CMS for who publishes on a Tuesday, not for what was on a conference slide. In Quebec that Tuesday often includes a French string, a lawyer’s footnote, and a sales page that must still pass Core Web Vitals. AERVIO ships both Next.js and WordPress. We do not ship a religion.

This is the rule we use on web development briefs from Montreal.

The only question that actually decides

Who is allowed to change a sentence without calling a developer?

• If the answer is “a marketer, in French and English, this week” — WordPress (or a similarly boring CMS) is usually honest.
• If the answer is “a designer-engineer, and the UI is a product” — Next.js is usually honest.
• If the answer is “both, on different surfaces” — you may need two front doors, not a heroic hybrid.

Everything else (SSR, islands, page builders) is implementation. The political problem is editorial control under Bill 96.

What WordPress is still for

WordPress remains a good default when:

• Editorial cadence is weekly or faster
• Non-developers must ship landing pages
• The company already has wp-admin muscle memory
• The site is mostly documents: services, articles, locations

What we strip on day one: page builders stacked three deep, “SEO” plugins that write meta from a template, and backup plugins fighting the host’s backup. A WordPress site that is slow is almost never “PHP’s fault.” It is 40 plugins and an image pipeline from 2017.

We still treat WordPress as a product: PHP version, limited plugins, object cache when it earns its keep, and a backup you can restore onto a staging URL. If nobody has restored it this year, you do not have a backup.

What Next.js is for

Next.js earns its keep when the interface is the product: client portals, logged-in desks, marketing sites that share components with an app, or pages where INP dies under a page builder.

It is also the honest choice when you want content in git — reviews, previews, and a designer who already lives in a repo. It is a dishonest choice when the CEO’s assistant must change the GST number on Friday and the only editor is VS Code.

App Router, server components, and metadata APIs are useful. They are not a ranking bonus by themselves. Google indexes HTML. If we ship an empty shell, we failed, regardless of framework.

Quebec-specific constraints the generic comparison posts skip

Language is a field, not a plugin toggle. Public-facing Quebec sites often need French-first content. That means the CMS model has `fr` and `en` as data, not a machine translation overlay. See our notes on French-first websites and the French door at /fr.

Law 25 (Quebec privacy) cares where form data goes. A Next.js form posting to a US-only SaaS without a contract story is not “modern.” It is a legal conversation. We map the destination before we map the colours.

Editors in two languages will break a clever i18n scheme that only a developer understands. If the French page can drift from the English page, we show that in the CMS, not in a spreadsheet named `copy-final-FINAL`.

Hybrid, without the buzzword

Headless WordPress + Next.js is a real architecture. It is also how projects go late.

Use it when:

• Editors refuse to leave wp-admin
• The public site must share UI with an application
• You will budget for two build pipelines and a preview that actually works

Do not use it to “future-proof.” You are buying a second runtime. We would rather ship a fast WordPress theme or a Next site with a CMS the client opens, then connect the CRM so leads do not die in a mailbox.

A pattern that works in Montreal more often than headless: WordPress for the marketing site, Next.js for the authenticated tool, same design tokens, same NAP, separate deploys. Search indexes the marketing host. The app does not pretend to be a blog.

Performance is a content problem

LCP is usually a hero image. INP is usually a script and a menu. CLS is usually a webfont and a banner.

On WordPress we cut the script salad and stop loading a slider on mobile. On Next we are just as capable of shipping a 2 MB animation because it looked good in the template. AERVIO’s home uses motion; inner pages that sell should not compete with it.

We measure field data when we can (CrUX via PageSpeed), not only lab scores on office Wi-Fi.

SEO does not care about your repo

SEO / GEO cares that the URL returns a complete offer, a title that matches the H1, and internal links a crawler can follow. Next.js `generateMetadata` and a Yoast install are both fine if the sentence is true.

What kills rankings here is duplicate titles across 26 template routes, or a `/blog-article` that always shows the same post. We replaced that. Articles live at `/blog/[slug]`. The list is /blog-standard.

Cost shape, not a fake hourly

Fixed scope for a defined build. Then a retainer if you want us to keep publishing and watching Core Web Vitals. You own hosting, DNS, and the repo. If a vendor will not give you the keys, that is not a CMS choice — it is a hostage situation.

A decision table you can steal

If you want us to choose with you, send the last five pages you actually edited and who edited them. That email to hello@aervio.io is more useful than a feature matrix.

Hosting and who holds the keys

The CMS choice is worthless if the host account lives under a freelancer’s personal credit card. We write, in the proposal, whose email owns:

• Domain registrar
• DNS
• Hosting or Vercel/Netlify/Fly equivalent
• GitHub/GitLab
• Email (often the 365 tenant)

AERVIO can operate those. We will not be the only recovery email. If you leave, you take the accounts. That is the same rule as growth retainers.

Cheap shared hosting that cannot run a PHP version still in security support is not a WordPress problem. It is a hostage host. We will say so before we “optimize.”

Staging, previews, and Friday deploys

WordPress: a staging URL that is not production with a plugin, a copy of the database that does not email real customers, and a rule — no deploying landing pages at 16:50 ET on Friday.

Next.js: preview deployments on pull requests, and production only from main. If your editor cannot see a preview without a developer, you bought a repo, not a CMS.

We have watched companies learn this during a Black Friday pop-up that only existed on a laptop. Write the rule down. It is cheaper than a postmortem.

What we strip from theme leftovers

This site started as a multi-demo template. The leftovers that kill SEO and trust are predictable:

• Twenty-six routes with the same title
• `/blog-article` pointing at one fake post
• Forms posting to someone else’s Formspree
• Offices in New York that are museums
• `contact.html` buttons

If your site still has those, the stack debate is premature. We fix the corpse, then we pick Next or WordPress for the rebuild. A rebuild that copies the leftover IA is how you pay twice.

Accessibility is not a badge

Neither CMS makes you accessible. Menus that trap focus, carousels that cannot pause, contrast that fails on the “accent” colour — we treat those as bugs on money pages. Quebec public bodies have additional expectations; private companies still have customers using keyboards and readers. We do not sell an overlay widget as a solution. We fix the markup.

Send the five URLs you edited last and which CMS login you used. That is the brief.

Questions

Will you lock us into Next.js?

No. We pick the CMS you can actually edit. Many Quebec marketing sites stay WordPress. Product UIs and high-INP pages often go Next.js. You keep the repo and the hosting accounts.

Can WordPress be fast enough for SEO?

Yes, if plugins stay few, images are honest, and hosting is not a $4 shared box. We measure INP and LCP on the pages that sell, not on a lab homepage only.

Do we need headless WordPress?

Only if editors must stay in wp-admin and the front-end must be an app. Headless without an editor workflow is a more expensive brochure.