From Lovable to Claude Code: How I Rebuilt Our Marketing Site in 4 Hours

Three months ago, I moved ExactTempo's marketing site from Webflow to Lovable. Last week, I moved it again, this time from Lovable to Claude Code, GitHub, and Vercel. The entire migration took four hours. And honestly, I wish I'd done it sooner.

This isn't a knock on Lovable. It served us well for a stretch. But as our business started accelerating, I started scrutinizing the site for more than just how it looked. I started looking at SEO, page speed, scalability, and cost. What I found pushed us to make the switch, and the results have been worth every minute.

This post walks through the specific Lovable problems we hit, why Claude Code turned out to be the right alternative, and exactly how we made the move. If you've built a site on Lovable and are starting to feel the friction, this should save you some time.

Four Problems That Forced the Move from Lovable to Claude Code

I was a genuine fan of building on Lovable for about two months. Once I figured out how to shape prompts and tweak the raw HTML/CSS, it felt like a real step up from traditional CMS platforms. But around last month, I stopped evaluating the site on "good enough" and started pressure-testing it against the basics that actually drive business results. That's when four problems became impossible to ignore.

SEO Was Fundamentally Broken

This was the dealbreaker. Lovable builds React single-page applications (SPAs), which means search engines and AI crawlers can't read the content on your pages. When a crawler visits a Lovable site, it sees an empty HTML shell: a <div id="root"></div> and some script tags. No headings, no body text, no internal links. From Google's perspective, your site is a blank page.

I found a pre-rendering service that would convert our pages to static HTML for crawlers. It cost an additional $20/month on top of Lovable, required ongoing configuration, and still didn't fully solve the problem for Google and AI search engines. For a company investing real time in content marketing and SEO, this was a non-starter.

Page Speed Fell Below Google's Standards

SPAs ship large JavaScript bundles to the browser, which tanks Core Web Vitals, especially on mobile. Google explicitly uses these metrics as a ranking signal. Our Lovable site was scoring well below what a competitive marketing site needs, and that gap widens on mobile where Google applies even stricter performance standards. Slow pages mean frustrated visitors and lower search rankings, both of which we couldn't afford.

Control Disappeared as We Scaled

Lovable is genuinely great for spinning up a few pages quickly. But as soon as we needed to build a blog, replicate use case and solution pages across ten or more variations, and scale the site's content library, it started falling apart. The probabilistic nature of AI-generated outputs meant I'd get different layouts and structures every time, even with near-identical prompts. One page would look right, but each subsequent page started to veer off course. Across 20+ pages, I was spending more time fixing inconsistencies than actually building.

The Cost Didn't Make Sense

Lovable's Pro plan starts at $25/month, but credits burn through fast when you're iterating on a production site. Add the pre-rendering service ($20/month) and the hours lost fighting platform limitations, and we were spending north of $100/month before I even factored in my own time. Meanwhile, Claude Code was already included in the Anthropic plan we were paying for. GitHub is free. Vercel's free tier handles our traffic comfortably. When I added it all up, we were paying more for a measurably worse result.

The 4-Hour Migration: Step by Step

Once I decided to make the move, I told my co-founder and CTO, Rob, that I wanted him to set me up with a proper Claude Code environment so I could handle the migration myself. We've worked together for 20 years and I've always been the marketing and sales side of our partnership, so he looked at me like I was a little crazy. But the problems were real, so we made it happen.

Rob produced a walkthrough video covering the full setup for anyone dealing with the same Lovable issues. I've embedded the link here:

Here's the step-by-step breakdown of what we did.

Step 1: Set Up the Dev Environment (~30 Minutes)

The entire toolchain took about an hour to install and configure:

• Claude Code via the Ghostty terminal for AI-assisted development
• Visual Studio Code for browsing and editing files directly
• GitHub Desktop for version control and collaboration
• Vercel for hosting and automatic deployments

None of this required deep engineering knowledge. Rob walked me through each tool, and within an hour I had a fully working development environment on my machine.

Step 2: Connect and Export from Lovable (~15 Minutes)

We connected our existing Lovable project to GitHub, which pulled the full codebase into VS Code and Claude Code. This gave me a starting point with all our existing content and design elements rather than starting from zero.

Step 3: Rebuild with Claude Code (~3 Hours)

This was the critical step. I prompted Claude Code to rebuild the site from scratch as a marketing site fully optimized for SEO, page speed, and a predictable, maintainable structure.

Claude selected the Astro framework, which ships zero JavaScript by default and generates static HTML at build time. That single architectural decision solved the SEO and speed problems immediately. Astro sites routinely score 100 on Lighthouse SEO audits, and the static HTML means every crawler (Google, Bing, Perplexity, ChatGPT) can read every word on every page without any pre-rendering workarounds.

I was genuinely surprised at how quickly it executed and how accurately it captured the design details. Nearly perfect on the first pass, which is the opposite of the Lovable experience where each generation felt like a roll of the dice.

Step 4: Deploy to Vercel (~15 Minutes)

I committed the rebuilt site to a new GitHub repo and connected it to Vercel. The site was live within minutes, with automatic deployments triggered by every future commit. No server to manage, no manual deployment process.

Early Results After the Switch

The new site went live just a few days ago. Here are the early results that confirmed this was the right call.

Search crawlers found us immediately. Within hours of launch, AI and search crawlers were reading the full content of every page. This was completely impossible on Lovable without the pre-rendering workaround, and it's mission-critical for anyone serious about SEO.

Page speed jumped into the 90s. Both desktop and mobile performance scores improved dramatically. Astro's zero-JS-by-default architecture means pages load nearly instantly, which directly supports better search rankings and lower bounce rates.

Content scaling became predictable. Astro's component-based architecture makes it simple to build page templates that replicate consistently. One prompt referencing a basic skill file produces the same structure every time. We went from fighting layout drift on every new page to building with confidence.

Monthly costs dropped to nearly zero. No Lovable subscription, no pre-rendering service. Our hosting, version control, and AI development tools are either free or part of subscriptions we were already paying for. The savings add up to $75-100+/month.

The building experience is just better. Everything integrates with my other Claude workflows, skills, and plugins. Instead of bouncing between a web-based builder and various third-party workarounds, I'm working in one environment where the AI understands the full context of what I'm building.

Should You Make the Same Move?

I've talked with a lot of people who built a site or an app on Lovable and hit a wall. If that's you, here's how I'd think about it.

If you're building a quick prototype or an internal tool that doesn't need to rank in search, Lovable is still a solid choice. It's fast, the learning curve is low, and for simple use cases it delivers real value.

But if you're building a marketing site that needs to support real SEO, perform well on mobile, scale to dozens of pages, and stay affordable in production, the Claude Code plus GitHub plus Vercel stack is a meaningful upgrade. The four-hour migration makes the ROI hard to argue with, especially when the alternative is paying more per month for a platform that actively works against your search visibility.

If you're wrestling with any of these Lovable problems and could use some help making the move, feel free to reach out here on our site or find me directly on LinkedIn. Always happy to compare notes.