Workhuman Live Orlando 2026

Led migration of the Workhuman Live marketing platform from WordPress to headless Contentful and Next.js, improving Lighthouse performance from 49 to 99 and reducing load time by 86%.

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Tools used:

Next.js, TypeScript, Contentful, AWS, Figma

The Challenge

For Orlando 2026, the challenge was bigger than launching another event site. We needed to support a growing registration target while also rethinking the underlying platform powering the Workhuman Live marketing experience. The legacy WordPress setup made it harder to achieve the level of speed, flexibility, and scalability needed for a flagship event, especially as content, design expectations, and business needs continued to grow. At the same time, the site still needed to feel premium, dynamic, and informative enough to convert visitors into attendees. Accessibility remained a key requirement throughout, alongside the need to support editorial agility and deliver on a tight event timeline. The challenge was balancing ambitious experience goals with the complexity and risk of a full platform transition.

The Solution

To address this, I led the migration of the Workhuman Live marketing platform from WordPress to a headless Contentful and Next.js architecture, creating a stronger foundation for both the Orlando event and future scalability. The approach centered on close collaboration across development, design, and content teams to translate the event vision into a reusable, component-based system that was both visually polished and technically sustainable. Contentful provided a more modular editorial model, while Next.js enabled a significantly faster and more performant frontend experience. Throughout the build, accessibility and usability remained core priorities, with attention to semantic structure, keyboard support, and inclusive patterns. This new architecture gave the team greater flexibility, improved maintainability, and dramatically elevated site performance, increasing Lighthouse from 49 to 99 and reducing load time by 86%.