A five-person agency’s path off WordPress
Gearbox, a five-person web agency, builds sites and applications for clients ranging from breweries to government agencies. The team’s defining approach is "dev-first" — a contrast to the marketing-led focus of many competing agencies. Central to that strategy is a stack built on Next.js and Vercel, chosen for its flexibility across small projects and larger enterprise work, even when clients aren’t ready for a full headless migration at once.
Founder and CEO Troy McGinnis started Gearbox using WordPress, the technology he knew from his previous agency. After two years of wrestling with security, maintenance, and performance issues, the team sought a headless stack. They initially tried Gatsby but found it, along with WordPress, still too restrictive.
"Coming from the WordPress world to the Vercel world, everything in our life has become more efficient. Things like cloning an existing project or onboarding a new developer used to take many hours. Compare this against Next.js and Vercel, which takes less than five minutes. We clone the repo from GitHub, hook it up to Sanity CMS, and then we are up and running. It’s insanely fast."
Troy McGinnis, Gearbox CEO
Incremental headless adoption, not a big bang
Gearbox relies on Vercel’s Edge Middleware to adopt Next.js incrementally rather than forcing an all-at-once switch. One concrete use case is managing blog redirects to preserve SEO. The team uses Edge Middleware to automatically rewrite new posts to an existing WordPress blog under the hood — filtering traffic and pointing to other services and websites while masking the URL. This avoids complicated server configuration and lets the team phase migrations and manage scope. When the WordPress blog is eventually fully moved, the middleware has already smoothed the path.
Security and speed as differentiators
Security is a core concern for Gearbox, particularly because legacy WordPress installs are frequent sources of vulnerabilities. McGinnis recalls a client who ran a penetration test on their legacy WordPress stack only for it to fail within hours. His immediate reaction: "if this was on Vercel and Next.js, we wouldn’t be having this problem. We’d be locked down on security, and Vercel would be handling all this for us." With Vercel, requests are isolated and content replicated globally, providing security by default.
The team also finds significant efficiency gains in Vercel Preview Deployments. Previously, reviewing development content meant pulling down the database from the server or connecting to a separate database and downloading files — a time-consuming process even just to review code. With Vercel’s Preview URLs, the work is integrated directly into the workflow: "it’s just there," McGinnis notes.
Reshaped workflows, sustained growth
Gearbox has now been all-in on Vercel and Next.js for roughly three years. The stack has reshaped how the team approaches development, says McGinnis. Clients who aren’t ready for a fully composable tech stack still benefit from each increment of migration toward Next.js and Vercel, and the agency's broader client base continues to grow.
