I recently rebuilt my personal website using Cursor AI with Next.js, moving away from my old WordPress setup—and someone with no coding background was genuinely surprised that a website could be built without WordPress!
The journey was fun, but not without its challenges. One area where I especially felt the difference was SEO. With WordPress, a single plugin handled everything: titles, meta descriptions, canonical URLs, schema, etc. With Next.js, I had to guide Cursor step-by-step to:
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Generate SEO tags
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Add canonical URLs
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Create structured data/schema
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Understand when to use server-side rendering vs client-side rendering
Now that everything is in place and the site looks and works the way I want, I’m focusing on streamlining my workflow, especially when publishing new blog articles.
Right now, I have to manually prompt Cursor for each article, refer to readme files for formatting consistency, and copy-paste markdown into the codebase. It’s functional but not very efficient.
So here’s my question:
Should I install a headless CMS to simplify this?
If so:
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Which one would you recommend for a Next.js setup?
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How easy is it to configure, especially for SEO?
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My ideal workflow: Drop in markdown content → Click publish → Blog goes live with updated sitemap and all SEO tags in place.
Alternatively, could I automate the whole thing with tools like n8n or Make?
Would love to hear how others solved this, open to ideas! 