Rebuilding Weed-Garden with Nuxt.js for Better SEO

After diving into SEO research and figuring out what really matters for improving our site’s performance, we made a big decision: the Weed-Garden website is moving from Vue to Nuxt.js. The main reason? Server-side rendering (SSR) is simply better for SEO than relying on dynamic pages. This shift is going to help us rank better for the important keywords and phrases that matter to our audience.

At the same time, we’re reorganizing things so that the main application lives under a new subdomain: app.weed-garden.com. The rest of the site—the marketing pages, content-driven sections, and anything SEO-focused—will be built out using Nuxt.js. Why this change? After some deep dives into SEO strategies, it’s clear that SSR, combined with keyword-targeted pages, gives us a huge advantage.

Why SSR is Better for SEO

For a while, we’ve been relying on client-side rendering with Vue. But when you start reading up on SEO, you quickly realize that search engines—and users—prefer fast, server-rendered pages.

With SSR, the server sends fully-rendered HTML to the browser, which means search engines and users don’t have to wait for JavaScript to load before seeing content. This speed boost is crucial because search engines like Google use page load times as a ranking factor. With dynamic pages, the browser has to process all the JavaScript before rendering the full content, which slows things down.

Another benefit is how search engines crawl content. With SSR, everything a crawler needs—like meta descriptions, headers, and content—arrives fully formed. Dynamic pages, on the other hand, can confuse crawlers since the content isn’t immediately available. That’s a big deal when we’re trying to get our cannabis ERP software seen by the right people.

This switch to Nuxt.js lets us fully take advantage of SSR, which is especially important for the content-heavy pages we’ll be building. Pages targeting specific keywords and phrases will now be fully server-rendered, helping us rise up in search results faster.

What We’ve Been Working on Today

1. Switching to Nuxt.js: The big move is underway. We’re rebuilding the website in Nuxt.js, focusing on SEO-first development. The app will stay on Vue but move to a subdomain (app.weed-garden.com), while the website will slowly evolve into a Nuxt.js-powered platform.
2. Content and Keyword Strategy: We’ve been laying the groundwork for content pages that target specific SEO terms. Over time, we’ll add more dedicated pages built around keywords and phrases, making sure every piece of content is optimized for search engines.
3. Learning SEO Tools: We’ve started exploring tools like Screaming Frog and SEMRush. Screaming Frog will help us understand how well our site is structured and where we need to make improvements, like fixing broken links or addressing page speed issues. SEMRush is next on the list, and it’s going to be fun adding this tool to our “knowledge base,” helping us track keywords, monitor competitors, and refine our strategy.
4. Fixing Soft 404s: One issue we discovered is soft 404 errors—pages that show a “not found” message but still return a successful status code. We’ll be cleaning these up to ensure search engines don’t penalize us, and that our content is properly indexed.

What’s Next

As we continue building with Nuxt.js, the next phase will focus on:

• Fixing SEO Issues: Soft 404 errors are at the top of the list, but we’ll also be diving deeper into other technical SEO problems.
• Optimizing Content: We’re committed to creating pages that aren’t just helpful to users but are perfectly optimized for search engines. This will include detailed content built around keywords we’ve identified as important to the cannabis industry.
• Learning Screaming Frog and SEMRush: We’re excited to add these tools to our workflow. They’re going to help us track SEO performance, fine-tune our strategies, and grow our visibility.

In short, the shift to Nuxt.js is more than just a technical upgrade—it’s a strategic move to ensure Weed-Garden’s website is optimized for SEO from the ground up. With SSR, we’ll be delivering faster pages, improving how search engines crawl our site, and positioning ourselves to rank higher for the cannabis-related searches that matter most.