From Monolithic PHP to Next.js and Vercel, CruiseCritic can move faster, and serve their customers with a better site experience

The web is any traveler’s first stop when it comes to planning vacations. Cruise Critic (a subsidiary of Tripadvisor) knows just how essential review sites are to today’s traveler; the company serves six million visitors every month. Growing traffic meant that Cruise Critic needed to evaluate their application stack as well as their development workflow in order to scale. 

The company’s engineering organization turned to Vercel to help deliver high-performing web experiences at a faster pace. In Cruise Critic’s tightly coupled, monolithic PHP application, the team faced complex rewrites for even the smallest of changes. Delivering high-quality features in an iterative, agile way felt out of reach until developers adopted Next.js and Vercel. 

Major improvements to the developer experience means Cruise Critic builds software more efficiently. Engineering build times decreased from 30 minutes to less than eight minutes. The team’s workflow has become so fast they’re able to ship to production multiple times a day—a far cry from the days or weeks it used to take. 

"The most valuable feature of Vercel is that our team can focus on building products rather than worrying about infrastructure." — Robert Norman, Principal Software Engineer, Cruise Critic

Not only is development faster, but so is page performance. Cruise Critic saw an 85% decrease in page download time and a nearly 100% decrease in page size. With Vercel’s superior developer workflow, Cruise Critic is able to perform at a new level of scale.

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