Hey everyone 👋
I’ve been working on a personal project — a Morse Code Translator website — which I initially built with React and deployed to Netlify. It has been live for a few months and things mostly worked fine. However, I ran into a couple of frustrating issues that pushed me to start migrating the project to Next.js + Vercel.
Here’s what happened: Mysterious 500 errors: Tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs reported dozens of pages returning 500 errors when crawled. But when I manually visited those same URLs, everything worked perfectly. The worst part? Netlify doesn’t offer access to detailed server logs on the free plan, so I couldn’t debug the issue properly. It was super frustrating not knowing what was going wrong behind the scenes.
React + Netlify isn't great for multi-language support: I wanted to make the translator multilingual, but using plain React without a backend made it really painful to implement proper internationalization. With Next.js and next-intl, everything’s much smoother — and I get SSG (static site generation) out of the box, which is great for performance and SEO.
Now I’ve spent the past two weeks migrating everything. Most of the pages are already done and I’m currently in the testing phase. I’m a bit worried about the potential SEO impact of the migration, especially since the domain stays the same but the underlying framework and structure are changing.
Has anyone else faced similar issues with Netlify or React in production? Would love to hear your experience — especially around SEO, internationalization, or 500 errors during crawling. 🙏
Let me know if you'd like a shorter or more casual version, or if you're posting to a specific platform like Reddit or LinkedIn — I can tweak the tone accordingly.