I’ve fully migrated DubaiDiscoverer.com to Next.js — here’s why I had to leave Lovable (Vite + React)

Just wrapped up a full migration of my site (DubaiDiscoverer.com) to Next.js — after learning the hard way that my old setup was tanking my SEO.

Originally, I built the site using Lovable. It used Vite + React under the hood, and honestly, the development experience was fast and easy. Great if you’re in MVP mode.

But… over time I noticed something off: the site wasn’t indexing well on Google. I had all the basics covered — sitemap, robots.txt, meta tags via react-helmet (which I confirmed were implemented) — but SEO tools were still showing blank pages. And more importantly, Googlebot wasn’t reliably seeing the site’s actual content.

The problem? Lovable-generated projects don’t render text into the final HTML. Without server-side rendering (SSR), the content isn’t present in the initial page load — so search engines can’t see it. No SSR = no crawlable content = no search visibility.

While Google Search Console sometimes managed to pick up content after rendering, most SEO tools - and probably Googlebot most of the time - just saw empty pages.

This was a huge surprise. I assumed any tool building “production-ready” sites would at least account for basic SEO fundamentals. But clearly, SSR isn't built into Lovable’s output, and it’s not something they highlight as a limitation either.

If you’re building anything that depends on organic traffic - a blog, content site, business site — this is a dealbreaker. It’s honestly surprising more people aren’t talking about it.

Switched to Next.js with SSR/static generation, and everything works as it should now — content is properly rendered, indexed, and showing up in search.

Hope this helps someone avoid the same pitfall. AI tools like Lovable are impressive, but make sure you know what’s going on under the hood if SEO matters to you.

You can see also before/after google crawler simulator results (screenshot 2 and 3)