M Street Music

M Street Music, a professional recording studio in Krapina, Croatia, was running on an aging WordPress site that had become a liability. Google Search Console flagged 168 broken URLs -remnants of old WordPress routes for events, galleries, product tags, and WooCommerce artifacts. Performance was poor, with no programmatic content strategy to capture long-tail search traffic. The studio had books on Gumroad but no funnel connecting content to services. In short: a great studio with zero digital infrastructure to match.

I rebuilt the entire platform from scratch using Next.js 14 with App Router, deployed on CroHost shared hosting via Passenger and a custom Node.js server. The site went from roughly 5 hand-built pages to over 100 programmatically generated ones:

17 service landing pages covering everything from vocal recording to Dolby Atmos mixing, each with structured data, FAQs, and internal cross-links. 62 audio glossary terms in Croatian, targeting long-tail educational queries with DefinedTerm schema markup. 5 equipment pages featuring the studio's signal chain, giving potential clients transparency into the gear behind the sound. A Hormozi-style lead magnet funnel -a free mixing ebook landing page with email capture (MailerLite), a thank-you page with an upsell to the Advanced Edition, and 10 automated emails across two sequences (nurture + post-purchase).

Next.js on shared hosting was an unconventional choice. Passenger doesn't support ISR reliably, so I leaned into static generation with full rebuilds. When remote builds hit memory limits (SIGABRT), I built a fallback: local builds with rsync to push the .next directory directly. A cron job pings the app every 4 minutes to avoid Passenger cold starts.

Static HTML for the funnel instead of routing it through Next.js. Two pages don't need a framework -Apache serves them before Passenger even wakes up, giving instant load times for the most conversion-critical pages.

SQLite over Postgres for the admin dashboard, blog, and a missing-term tracker that logs glossary searches with zero results -a lightweight feedback loop for content expansion.

Lighthouse scores: 99 Performance, 100 Accessibility, 100 Best Practices, 100 SEO. LCP dropped from 7.5s to 2.1s, TTFB from 6.6s to ~2s after diagnosing a standalone mode misconfiguration. 168 legacy WordPress URLs cleanly redirected via .htaccess with proper 301s. 103+ indexed URLs in sitemap, up from a handful. Full lead generation pipeline live: landing page, email automation, Meta Pixel tracking, and a value ladder from free content to paid studio services.

The result is a platform that does what a recording studio site rarely does -it actively generates leads, ranks for dozens of relevant terms, and runs reliably on budget hosting.