How L’Officiel Inc. migrated from a Ruby on Rails stack to get improved developer and end user experience on Vercel.

L’Officiel Inc. is a century-old fashion media group representing 10 renowned publications in more than 80 countries. Despite its global reach, the brand has a small team that maintains its 30 web properties, while also developing new features and working on special projects sold to clients. 

They migrated to Vercel to achieve two primary goals:

• SEO optimization to increase site traffic

• Reduce burden of infrastructure management

After a zero-downtime migration and 60% increase in site traffic, l’Officiel is calling Vercel and Next.js “a perfect fit” for their business.

Link to headingStriving for SEO visibility: Fast sites rank higher

After migrating to Next.js and Vercel, L’Officiel observed a striking improvement in web traffic, including a 60% boost in countries including Italy, the United States, Brazil, and more. This achievement can be attributed to SEO optimizations provided by Next.js and Vercel:

• User experience: L’Officiel’s faster website keeps users engaged with content for longer, improving the search ranking. Google considers site speed as a strong ranking factor in their algorithms. Because of this, faster websites will always rank higher in results.

• Font optimization: The L’officiel brand’s custom fonts are rendered fast, at any weight. Next.js has built-in Automatic Webfont Optimization, which eliminates extraneous data fetches and ensures your font always renders on time.

• Image optimization: The plug-and-play next/image component appropriately formats images based on their end-user’s device—with minimal additional JavaScript. 

Next.js prioritizes SEO and offers developers tools and guidance for seamless implementation of effective SEO practices. The framework includes integrated analytics for straightforward performance monitoring. When used with Vercel's Edge Network, you gain automated, deployment-specific performance data for better decision-making.

From the moment we finished the migration of all our projects to the new stack, we didn’t have even a minute of downtime. My work is way more optimized and flawless since then and the whole organization is really happy.

Giuseppe de Martino Norante, Head of Digital Product

Link to headingAdvanced infra management with a lean team

To accomplish their second goal of reduced infrastructure management, L’Officiel orchestrated a flawless headless tech stack migration to Vercel and Next.js. 

Their previous stack consisted of a custom-built monolithic multi-tenant application developed with Ruby on Rails and deployed to a physical server. It made it too difficult for the sole developer, L’Officiel’s head of digital product Giuseppe de Martino Norante, to manage. So they switched to Vercel and Next.js and went headless. 

Martino Norante faced a key pain with his previous Ruby on Rails stack: it was unreliable. It would often go completely offline due to server maintenance issues or traffic spikes. Plus, manually reviewing SSL certificates for over 30 domains was time-consuming when he needed to focus on bigger issues. 

With Vercel's Managed Infrastructure, L'Officiel only needs to worry about their Frontend Next.js code, not configuring their backend infrastructure. With Vercel's Framework Defined Infrastructure, the team can focus on user and brand experiences, instead of pre-provisioning, maintenance, or worrying about additional overhead from the L'Officiel team.

While Martino Norante considered other frameworks for his headless stack overhaul, he went with Vercel and Next.js because of the out-of-the-box features, simple updates, and lightning-fast ISR—a necessity with tens of thousands articles to manage. 

The most impressive part: the team achieved the headless migration with zero-downtime.

Link to headingA new century of success 

After experiencing almost two years of success with Vercel, Martino Norante says, “I’ll stick with Next.js and Vercel for many years to come. All our internal platforms and tools are developed with this stack as well, so there’s no need to look elsewhere at all.” 

With everything running smoothly, we’re excited to see what the next century will bring for this time-honored fashion and lifestyle publication.