ZHNIV-AGRO agricultural machinery catalogue on Next.js

ZHNIV-AGRO has been making and supplying farm machinery from Kremenchuk for over 15 years. The catalogue covers corn (ZhKU/ZhSU) and sunflower headers, adapters, rapeseed tables, transport trolleys and spare parts compatible with John Greaves headers of the ZhK-80, ZhK-82 and ZhNS series. The company also does metalworking: turning, milling, welding and cutting.

The old site ran on OpenCart and no longer matched either the size of the catalogue or modern speed requirements. Artbrain built a new showcase site on Next.js 16 with PostgreSQL: around 219 products and 471 photos were carried over from the old site, plus UK/EN localisation, an interactive clients map across Ukraine and a custom CMS for independent content management.

A catalogue of hundreds of machinery and spare-part items ran on an outdated OpenCart. The site loaded slowly, was awkward to manage, and any change risked a drop in search rankings. The company needed a modern showcase site: fast, easy to fill with content, and without losing the traffic it had built up over the years.

Key requirements: move the whole catalogue and photos without loss, keep the old URLs via 301 redirects, add UK/EN localisation, and build a custom admin panel of about 30 sections. The design and interactivity (sliders, clients map, galleries) had to stay exactly as agreed with the client. No cart was needed: conversion runs through a call-back request and a feedback form.

The approved design sits on a ready-made template packed with jQuery code: its sliders, clients map and galleries only switch on after the page loads. The standard Next.js approach, where React takes over the finished page, clashed with that code and broke the layout. Rewriting the whole template would have been slow and costly, so we took another route and split the site into two circuits.

The public side of the site is made up of fast showcase pages. They are built on the server: data comes from the database and goes to the browser as ready HTML, with no extra React processing. Because of that the design and every plugin behave exactly as intended, and pages open instantly. The admin panel is the opposite, a full React application, because that is where live interactivity is genuinely needed. Each part of the site runs the way that fits it best.

The new zhnivagro.com.ua runs on Next.js 16 and PostgreSQL instead of the old OpenCart. The catalogue of about 219 products and 471 photos was fully migrated, and all old addresses stay alive through 301 redirects, so search indexation and rankings were preserved. The site is bilingual (UK/EN), with catalogue search, product cards with specs and compatibility, a blog, FAQ and an interactive clients map across Ukraine.

The ZHNIV-AGRO team runs the catalogue, blog, homepage and enquiries on its own through a custom admin panel of about 30 sections. Submissions from the call-back forms come in as leads with statuses. We also worked on speed: the template's CSS dropped from 585 KB to 64 KB, and the heavy map now loads lazily, so pages open fast even on a phone.