Sydney Theme to Next.js: Moving the Slider, the Elementor Pages and the Rest

Your Sydney site has four filing cabinets

A Sydney site that has been running a few years rarely keeps its content in one place. The theme, its free companion plugin, a page builder and a demo importer each filed things their own way. Before anyone writes code, we open all four drawers.

Older installs may have a fifth drawer. Sydney still ships compatibility code for SiteOrigin Page Builder, and its own front-page widgets (services, employees, testimonials, facts, skills and portfolio among them) were built for SiteOrigin rows. If your home page predates the Elementor era, that is where its layout lives, saved in SiteOrigin's own page data.

The hero that never lived on the homepage

Sydney decides what sits at the top of the front page with one Customizer setting, front_header_type, which can be a slider, an image, a video or nothing. Inner pages have a separate setting. Choose the slider and the content comes from settings named slider_image_1 through slider_image_5, slider_title_1 through slider_title_5, matching subtitles, a button text and a button link, plus an option for what phones see.

None of that is in a page export. Switch themes and the hero simply vanishes, which is how some owners discover where it was stored. For a migration we read those settings straight from the database, list each slide's image, headline and button, and decide with you whether a rotating slider is still worth having. It often is not. A single strong image with one headline loads faster and says one thing clearly, and if your Sydney site is slow, the slider script and its stylesheet are part of the reason.

Colors and fonts that Elementor borrowed

Here is a detail that catches designers. When Sydney is activated it turns off Elementor's global color and typography schemes, so your Elementor pages take their palette and fonts from Sydney's Customizer. Export only the Elementor data and the colors look wrong. We record both, then turn them into one set of design tokens in the new build. Fonts move to next/font and are served from your own domain, which also settles a known gap: Sydney's local Google Fonts option does not cover fonts chosen only inside Elementor.

The header itself depends on which version you have. Newer sites use the Header and Footer Builder, with desktop, mobile and off-canvas layouts. Older sites may still run the legacy header, which has no builder section in the Customizer at all. Either way we screenshot it at three widths and rebuild it as one component. If the header is misbehaving right now, Sydney header not showing and Sydney mobile menu not working cover the usual causes.

Turning Elementor widgets into components

Elementor content does not convert itself, and anyone who promises a one-click import is selling the click. What does work is a census. We list every widget type used across the site, count how often each appears, and build one React component for each type that matters: a hero, a services grid, a testimonial carousel, a pricing table, a gallery, a team row. Then a script pulls the text, images and links out of each page's Elementor data and drops them into the matching component.

On a Sydney site the widget list usually draws from three suppliers. Elementor's own widgets. Sydney Toolbox's widgets, such as the portfolio, employee carousel, testimonials, posts and slider. And Sydney Pro's additions, which include Timeline, Pricing Tables and Food Menu. Restaurants on Sydney Pro tend to have the food menu, and it deserves a proper structured content type in the new site rather than a block of formatted text, so prices can be edited in one place.

Our Elementor to Next.js guide covers the extraction in depth, including popups, forms and Theme Builder templates. The bigger question of whether a builder belongs on your site at all is argued in page builders vs Next.js.

A one-click Elementor import is like a one-click house move: the boxes arrive, and nobody knows which room they go in.

Sydney Pro modules and their replacements

Sydney Pro is sold in three tiers, as of October 2026: Personal at $79 a year regular price for one site, Professional at $149 for ten, and Agency at $249 for a hundred, with a first-year discount and renewals at full price. Each Pro module you use is a feature the new site has to provide another way. Most become plain code, and a few become Athena features.

Once the new site is live, nothing on it needs a Sydney license. Keep Pro active until launch, though, because the old site has to keep rendering while we compare the two side by side. If you sell online, read WooCommerce to Next.js before deciding where the store goes.

The third option

Athena CMS, with AI agents on staff.

Not a theme and not a blank Next.js repo. The content system we put behind every custom site: plain fields, a real preview, every version kept, and AI agents that handle the chores a plugin only nags you about.

• PPicassoImages
• AApolloSite analysis
• AAresCompetitor watch
• PPrometheusContent holes
• AAtlasPage depth and structure
• DDelphiAI search visibility

ZDAOAand 12 more agents. Two come with Athena; the rest are monthly add-ons.

Meet the agentsTake the Athena tour

PPicassoWeekly · ImagesAApolloWeekly · Site analysis

Clearing out what the Starter Site left behind

aThemes Starter Sites offers 3 free demos and 17 for Pro customers, and an import brings far more than the pages you kept. Typical leftovers are sample pages with lorem ipsum, demo team members and testimonials in Sydney Toolbox, placeholder images in the media library and menu items pointing at pages you deleted. None of it should cross over.

Since April 2025, aThemes, Sydney and the Starter Sites plugin have belonged to Awesome Motive, the company behind WPBeginner. That does not change your content, but it is a reasonable moment to ask what you are still depending on. During the audit we compare three lists: pages in WordPress, pages linked from your menus, and pages Google has indexed. Anything in the first list but not the other two is usually demo residue. If a stray demo page did get indexed, it gets a redirect to the closest real page so the URL does not turn into an error.

The Sydney move, start to finish

1. 1

   Back up everything

   Copy the database, uploads, theme, child theme and plugins. Note the Sydney version, since recent releases changed the header builder and sticky header.

2. 2

   Crawl and list URLs

   Crawl the live site and export Search Console's top pages. Include project, service and team pages created by Sydney Toolbox, which have their own URL patterns.

3. 3

   Record the Customizer

   Read the front_header_type and slider settings, the header builder layout, colors, fonts and footer. Screenshot the home page and header at desktop, tablet and phone widths.

4. 4

   Census the widgets

   List every Elementor, Sydney Toolbox and Sydney Pro widget in use, with a count per page. Mark the ones used once; they can often be simpler.

5. 5

   Export structured content

   Pull services, employees, testimonials, clients, projects and timeline entries with their custom fields. These become content types in Athena, not pasted text.

6. 6

   Build and compare

   Rebuild the design as Next.js components and fill them from the exported content. Compare each page against the old site on a private preview address.

7. 7

   Map redirects and launch

   Keep every URL that can stay, redirect the rest, move DNS, submit the sitemap and watch Search Console for errors in the weeks after.

Keeping the rankings and the photos

Most Sydney sites are small business sites with a modest number of pages, which makes the URL plan short but unforgiving: each service page probably carries real search traffic. We keep the same addresses wherever possible, including the pages Sydney Toolbox generates for projects and services, and write a permanent redirect for each one that changes. The method is in WordPress to Next.js redirects, with the wider picture in migrating without losing SEO and how URL structures carry over.

Images on a Sydney site hide in odd corners: slider images referenced from Customizer settings, Elementor section backgrounds, team photos inside Toolbox entries. We collect them from all three, keep the originals, and let next/image serve sizes that fit each screen in modern formats. The full process is in moving WordPress images to Next.js. If the site has a blog, moving a WordPress blog covers categories, pagination and feeds.

Life after drag and drop, and when to stay

An honest word for Elementor fans: Athena CMS is not a drag-and-drop builder. You edit text, images, services, team members and offers in plain fields, see a real preview, and every version is kept. The layout is fixed in code, which is exactly why an update cannot shift your header on a Tuesday. Agents handle the chores: Apollo reads every page and says what to fix first, Argus catches broken links and failing forms, Echo works on reviews, and Hermes drafts social posts. The move is explained at switching from WordPress.

Stay on Sydney if you rearrange your own layouts weekly, the site is a simple brochure, and it runs well. A tune-up or a fix for a stale stylesheet may be all you need. Move when the site has to load fast and bring in leads. Our Sydney vs Next.js comparison weighs the choice, the migration cost guide and timeline guide explain what drives the quote, and our rebuild service does the work. Other themes are covered under WordPress to Next.js.