The baseline says these pages already rank and are not clicked. 'compare
school performance' sits at position 6.1 with 0.43% CTR; 'compare schools' at
7.2 with 0.87%. The brand query 'school compare' draws 9.16% from the same
neighbourhood of the same results page, which rules out a ranking explanation
— when the snippet gives a reason to click, it gets clicked.
These SERPs are owned by the DfE's own 'Compare school performance' service.
The old title put a lowercase brand nobody searches for in the most valuable
pixels, then a near-paraphrase of that service's name. Beside the government's
own result it read as a lookalike.
Intent in the title, differentiator in the description. Titles now match what
people type, and the descriptions carry the one fact gov.uk does not publish:
how close you had to live to get a place.
/compare deliberately takes the tool phrasing rather than the homepage's, so
the two pages stop competing for one phrase. The root layout's default and
Open Graph copy were saying something different again; they now agree.
No hard school counts in any of it. The corpus moves with every data refresh
and this repo has already shipped one copy bug of that kind.
Tests guard the mechanics — SERP length, intent keyword, the differentiator,
no brand-first title — and leave the wording free to iterate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
25,193 schools make ~317 million pairs. The bare page stays indexable as the
landing page for the head term; the parameter space goes noindex, follow so
its outbound links still count.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
- Metric changes no longer refire /api/compare (the data is already
client-side; the picker is presentational) — the fetch effect depends
only on the URN set, with URL sync split into its own effect.
- The initial client fetch is skipped when the SSR payload already covers
the selected schools; national averages + benchmarks now arrive via SSR
props so nothing is lost by skipping.
- page.tsx fetches comparison and metrics in parallel.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0146VHeLAWjDVE2B5uU67jCB
Frontend
- Dynamic-import Chart.js components on detail/compare views so Chart.js
no longer ships in initial JS.
- Drop force-dynamic on home, compare, rankings so internal data fetches
reuse Next.js's per-call revalidate cache.
- Switch /school/[slug] to ISR with a 7-day revalidate window (school
data updates annually).
- Preconnect to analytics + postcodes.io; remove redundant defer on the
Umami Script tag (afterInteractive already covers it).
- Bump images.minimumCacheTTL to 1 year.
- Extract HowItWorks and Editorial sections as server components passed
to HomeView via slot props so their JSX stays out of the client bundle.
Backend
- Add GZipMiddleware (min 512 bytes).
- Add CacheAndETagMiddleware: per-path Cache-Control with long s-maxage
+ stale-while-revalidate, ETag generation, and 304 on If-None-Match.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Backend returns metrics as an array, not an object.
- Update MetricsResponse type to use MetricDefinition[] instead of Record
- Remove Object.values() conversion in compare and rankings pages
- Fix useMetrics hook to handle array instead of object
- Fix getMetric to use array.find() instead of object indexing
Fixes empty metric dropdown on compare page.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Add try-catch blocks to all page components
- Provide empty data fallbacks when API calls fail
- Use optional chaining for safer property access
- Log errors for debugging
Fixes 'Cannot read properties of undefined' errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Migrate from vanilla JavaScript SPA to Next.js 16 with App Router
- Add server-side rendering for all pages (Home, Compare, Rankings)
- Create individual school pages with dynamic routing (/school/[urn])
- Implement Chart.js and Leaflet map integrations
- Add comprehensive SEO with sitemap, robots.txt, and JSON-LD
- Set up Docker multi-service architecture (PostgreSQL, FastAPI, Next.js)
- Update CI/CD pipeline to build both backend and frontend images
- Fix Dockerfile to include devDependencies for TypeScript compilation
- Add Jest testing configuration
- Implement performance optimizations (code splitting, caching)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
