# Essential Code

> Micro web agency for headless website migrations. We move websites from legacy CMS platforms (WordPress, Drupal, TYPO3) to modern headless setups and stay accountable for them after launch.

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Agent Skills index: [https://www.essentialcode.eu/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json](https://www.essentialcode.eu/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json)

## Core Services

- [Headless Audit](https://www.essentialcode.eu/services/headless-audit): Technical audit of your current website setup with a clear migration recommendation. Fixed price.
- [AI Marketing Stack Readiness Check](https://www.essentialcode.eu/services/ai-readiness-check): A scored report on whether your content model and governance are ready for agents to operate. Five dimensions, rated and evidenced, delivered in one week. Fixed price.
- [AI Visibility Audit](https://www.essentialcode.eu/services/ai-visibility-audit): A scored audit of whether AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can reach, understand, and cite your site, with the fixes. Delivered in one week. Fixed price.
- [Headless Website](https://www.essentialcode.eu/services/headless-website): New website built on a headless CMS with a modern frontend framework.
- [Headless Migration](https://www.essentialcode.eu/services/headless-migration): Migration from WordPress, Drupal, or TYPO3 to a headless architecture. SEO preserved, performance improved.
- [Agentic Marketing Automation](https://www.essentialcode.eu/services/agentic-marketing-automation): A governed AI control room over your headless CMS, so your marketing team builds and publishes pages by chatting with an agent, with a human approving every publish.
- [Fractional Marketing Engineer](https://www.essentialcode.eu/services/fractional-marketing-engineer): One senior engineer for your marketing team's website work, AI tooling, and integrations, on a monthly subscription.
- [White-Label Web Development](https://www.essentialcode.eu/services/white-label-web-development): Technical partner for design agencies. We build, they keep the client relationship.
- [ERPNext E-Commerce Integration](https://www.essentialcode.eu/services/erpnext-ecommerce-integration): A headless storefront on top of ERPNext, so the marketing team controls the frontend without touching the ERP backend.
- [Odoo E-Commerce Integration](https://www.essentialcode.eu/services/odoo-ecommerce-integration): A headless storefront connected to Odoo, replacing the built-in webshop and QWeb templates with full frontend control.
- [Business Central E-Commerce Integration](https://www.essentialcode.eu/services/business-central-ecommerce-integration): A headless storefront that syncs directly with Business Central, no Shopify in between and no third-party connectors.

## Migrations by platform

- [WordPress to headless](https://www.essentialcode.eu/migrations/wordpress-to-headless): Plugin sprawl gone, page-builder lock-in dropped, every URL mapped with a full redirect plan.
- [Webflow to headless](https://www.essentialcode.eu/migrations/webflow-to-headless): Pixel-accurate rebuild in code, CMS Collections moved into a real content system, the visual-editor ceiling removed.
- [Drupal to headless](https://www.essentialcode.eu/migrations/drupal-to-headless): Paragraph sprawl normalized, Views replaced by API queries, multi-site setups consolidated or split cleanly.
- [TYPO3 to headless](https://www.essentialcode.eu/migrations/typo3-to-headless): TypoScript and Fluid retired, the backend swapped for a real CMS, multilingual content carried over with hreflang.
- [Umbraco to headless](https://www.essentialcode.eu/migrations/umbraco-to-headless): Document Type sprawl normalized, the backoffice replaced, the Windows and SQL Server bill off your books.
- [Sitecore to headless](https://www.essentialcode.eu/migrations/sitecore-to-headless): Templates and renderings normalized, the Content Editor gone, license and infrastructure costs cut.
- [Kentico to headless](https://www.essentialcode.eu/migrations/kentico-to-headless): Page Type sprawl normalized, the Pages app retired, unused EMS features taken off the bill.
- [Squarespace to headless](https://www.essentialcode.eu/migrations/squarespace-to-headless): Templates and blocks turned into real components, performance fixed, every URL preserved.
- [Wix to headless](https://www.essentialcode.eu/migrations/wix-to-headless): The drag-and-drop ceiling removed, Velo code rebuilt as real components, performance fixed.
- [Contentful to DatoCMS or Storyblok](https://www.essentialcode.eu/migrations/from-contentful): A headless-to-headless move scoped against your renewal date, with the frontend code rewrite included.

## Blog Posts

- [Our homepage scores 100 on accessibility. It was still failing Level A.](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/accessibility-score-100-still-failing-level-a/): Five accessibility scanners, the rule source of each one read line by line, and what they actually detect for moving content. Plus the five-minute check and the 30-minute manual pass that cover what they miss.
- [The Shared AI Setup That Makes Multi-Market Content Work](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/shared-ai-setup-multi-market-content/): Putting AI on multi-market content one seat at a time gives you five different qualities of page. A shared setup, one content model, one brand rulebook, prompts that carry the constraints, and agent-assisted review with a human sign-off, is what makes six languages ship at one quality.
- [What we do not let an AI agent do in a client's CMS](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/what-we-do-not-let-an-ai-agent-do-in-a-clients-cms/): Our three hard lines for an AI agent in a client's CMS, the principle behind them, and why guardrails are the easy part of running AI in a marketing team.
- [The AI Control Center for Marketing Teams (and Why It Runs on Your CMS)](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/ai-control-center-marketing-teams/): Every tool grew an AI feature this year. What marketing teams need is a control center to run their AI, and it only works when built on a structured CMS.
- [Astro 7 Breaking Changes: What to Check Before You Upgrade](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/astro-7-marketing-site/): Astro 7's breaking changes are real, but cheap to fix on a clean foundation. We upgraded three production sites with zero breakages and builds nearly 3x faster.
- [Content QA Pipelines: Catching the Boring Failures Before They Ship](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/content-qa-pipelines-before-you-ship/): AI made production cheap. Now content QA is the bottleneck. Here is the split: which pre-publish checks belong to a machine, and which need a human.
- [Headless CMS Migration: What It Is and What Breaks](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/headless-cms-migration-guide/): A headless migration moves the system underneath your site while it stays live. What changes, what it costs, how long it takes, and where it goes wrong.
- [AI Internal Linking: How to Run a Linking Agent Without Wrecking Your SEO](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/internal-linking-at-scale-ai-assisted-seo/): An AI internal linking agent can crawl your library, find the orphans, and write the anchors. Here is the checklist it runs, the limits a person sets before it runs, and the decisions it has to hand back.
- [Content Reuse Across Channels and Markets: One Model, Many Outputs](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/content-reuse-channels-and-markets/): The same content retyped for every channel and every market is the everyday tax of page-bound content. One typed model removes it.
- [Salesforce Bought Contentful. What It Means for Your CMS.](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/contentful-salesforce-acquisition/): On June 1, 2026, Salesforce signed a deal to acquire Contentful. Here is what actually changes for existing customers, what does not, and how to think about your next renewal.
- [Why Strict Data Models Make Editors Faster: Notes From a Live Launch](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/strict-data-models-make-editors-faster/): How a current event-platform launch with 50 speakers and 50 events in two languages got entered ahead of schedule, and why a strict CMS data model is the reason.
- [DatoCMS MCP Server: Setup, Tools, and Real Workflows](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/control-datocms-from-claude-code/): The DatoCMS MCP server lets AI agents read and edit your content through sandboxed, type-checked scripts. How to set it up, what it does well, and where it breaks down.
- [Your website has two audiences now. Most agencies build for one.](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/websites-two-audiences-agentic-web/): One is your team using AI tools to work faster. The other is the AI agents visiting your site. Agencies still building for neither are a problem.
- [Your Blog Should Also Be a Markdown File](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/serve-your-blog-as-markdown-for-ai-crawlers/): Giving every blog post a clean Markdown copy helps humans who paste into Claude or ChatGPT, and may help AI crawlers too. Here is how to wire it up in Astro.
- [WordPress Plugin Supply Chain Attack: Is Your Site Still Compromised?](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/wordpress-plugin-supply-chain-attack/): The forced WordPress.org update neutralized the plugin backdoor but left wp-config.php untouched. Here is how to check your own site.
- [Translation Workflows That Don't Break Your CMS](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/translation-workflows-that-dont-break-your-cms/): Most translation workflows treat content like a document. A headless CMS treats it as structured data. The mismatch breaks formatting and lets content drift.
- [The Web Industry Has a Trust Problem](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/the-web-industry-has-a-trust-problem/): Web development has no entry barrier and no proof of competence. That is fine for the industry. It is expensive for the buyer.
- [Control Storyblok From Claude Code](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/control-storyblok-from-claude-code/): How to wire Claude Code into Storyblok so marketing teams can draft, edit, and publish without leaving their workflow. The MCP setup, the guardrails, and where it breaks down.
- [What Your CMS Vendor Won't Tell You About Lock-In](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/cms-vendor-lock-in/): CMS lock-in costs companies thousands of hours and tens of thousands of euros before they even realize it. Here is how to spot it, measure it, and get out.
- [What a Website Audit Actually Reveals](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/what-a-website-audit-reveals/): Most teams know something is wrong with their website. Few know exactly what. A structured audit turns gut feelings into a plan before a five-figure rebuild.
- [Building a website is getting easier. Running one is not.](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/building-is-getting-easier-running-is-not/): AI tools can generate a landing page in minutes. But migrating a website without losing traffic or rankings is a different problem entirely.
- [How to Launch a Website in a New Market Without Rebuilding Everything](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/launch-website-new-market/): Expanding into a new country should not mean rebuilding your website. With the right architecture, adding a market is a content task.
- [What Happens in the First 30 Days After a Website Migration](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/first-30-days-after-website-migration/): The first 30 days after a migration determine whether you keep your traffic or spend a year recovering it. Here is what to watch.
- [WordPress to Storyblok Migration: 10x Faster, 6 Markets](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/eversports-manager-wordpress-to-storyblok-migration/): The site is ten times faster and the marketing team now manages six languages independently. How Eversports moved from WordPress to Storyblok, page by page.
- [Useful Unicode Characters for Content Editors](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/useful-unicode-characters-for-editors/): A practical reference of Unicode characters every content editor should know. Click to copy typographic quotes, dashes, special spaces, and more.
- [CMS Translation Workflow: Why Most Multilingual Setups Fail](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/multilingual-content-at-scale/): Most CMS platforms were not built for translation at scale. A proper CMS translation workflow keeps content, translators, and publishing inside one system.
- [AI Finally Killed Hourly Billing](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/ai-finally-killed-hourly-billing/): If your service provider is still billing by the hour in 2026, they have a problem. And so do you. AI compressed execution time. The pricing model broke.
- [Why We Built a Framework for Website Migrations (And What It Actually Looks Like)](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/essential-launch-framework/): Six phases, three decision points, and a process designed to prevent the most common ways website projects go wrong.
- [The Redirect Strategy That Preserves Your Traffic During a Website Migration](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/redirect-strategy-website-migration/): Redirect mapping is the most underestimated part of any website migration. Get it wrong and you lose years of SEO equity overnight.
- [Core Web Vitals After Migration: Why Headless Sites Perform Better](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/core-web-vitals-headless-migration/): WordPress sites pass Core Web Vitals only 45% of the time on mobile. Headless sites routinely score 90+. The difference is architectural.
- [What to Expect When You Work With a Micro Agency](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/what-to-expect-working-with-micro-agency/): No account managers. No status meetings that could have been an email. Here is how working with a micro agency actually works.
- [Structured Content vs Structured Data: Why Typed Fields Make Schema Write Itself](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/structured-content-seo-ai-marketing/): Structured content and structured data are not the same thing. Here is the clean line between them, and why typed CMS fields make schema.org markup correct by construction.
- [Signs Your CMS Is Holding Your Marketing Team Back](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/signs-cms-holding-marketing-team-back/): If publishing a blog post takes longer than writing it, your CMS is the bottleneck. Here are the warning signs and what to do.
- [Why Micro Agency Beats Big 'Do-Everything' Firms](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/why-micro-agencies-dont-need-do-it-all-overhead/): How micro agencies stay competitive by focusing on what they do best and partnering for the rest. Without the overhead of traditional agencies.
- [LLMs.txt: A Practical Guide for Marketing Teams](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/llms-txt-a-practical-guide-for-marketing-teams/): What llms.txt is, why it matters for your website's visibility in AI-powered search, and how marketing teams can implement it today.
- [White-Label Development: Technical Strength Without Your Own Dev Team](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/white-label-development-technical-strength-without-dev-team/): How white-label development partnerships let design agencies offer technical services without building an in-house development team.
- [Why Your Beautiful New Website Will Be Outdated in 6 Months](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/why-your-beautiful-new-website-will-be-outdated-in-6-months/): Why websites age faster than you think and what you can do to build for longevity instead of just launch day.
- [The Invisible Time Trap: Why CMS Editor Experience Determines Success](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/the-invisible-time-trap-why-editor-experience-matters/): How poor content editing experiences silently drain your team's time and why investing in editor experience pays for itself.
- [Micro Agencies: The Middle Ground Between Agency and Freelancing](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/micro-agencies-between-agency-and-freelancer/): What micro agencies are, why they're growing, and how they combine the best qualities of freelancers and traditional agencies.
- [From B2B Applications to Website Development: A Change in Perspective](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/from-b2b-applications-to-website-development-journey-of-rediscovery/): After running a B2B software agency for over a decade, I made an unexpected shift to modern web development. Here's what I learned.
- [WordPress Alternative: When to Leave and What Replaces It](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/wordpress-alternative-modern-cms-systems/): The real WordPress alternative for a growing business is a different architecture rather than another theme. Here is when switching is worth it and what replaces it.
- [Digital Offers: A Guide to Thorough Evaluation](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/digital-offers-guide/): How to evaluate software offers beyond feature lists. From understanding output vs. outcome to contract details and tech stack choices.
- [The Essential Code Guide to Self-Service Portals](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/self-service-portal-guide/): A comprehensive guide to self-service portals for smaller companies. From needs analysis to implementation and measuring success.
- [Your Digital Future: Investment or Cost Center?](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/digital-future-investment-or-cost-center/): Why your website budget should be framed as a strategic investment rather than an operational cost. And how to make the case internally.
- [The 5-Step Plan for Choosing the Right CMS](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/5-step-plan-for-choosing-cms/): A structured approach to evaluating and selecting the right CMS. From understanding your team's workflows to making the final decision.
- [Our Stack for Customer Portals and Authenticated Applications](https://www.essentialcode.eu/blog/customer-portals-nhost-hasura/): When a website needs a customer portal or anything behind a login, we build it on Nhost + Hasura. Here is how.

## About

- [About Essential Code](https://www.essentialcode.eu/about): Deliberately small. Senior team. Full ownership of what we ship.
- [Tech Stack](https://www.essentialcode.eu/tech-stack): The tools and platforms we build on.
- [Contact](https://www.essentialcode.eu/contact): david@essentialcode.eu