Elevating Performance and Reducing Costs: Scalable Websites with Vercel + On-Demand ISR

At Shift Lab, we excel at solving complex technical challenges for businesses navigating rapid growth. Recently, we helped a client with a large, Contentful-powered platform overcome scalability hurdles while reducing operational costs. Leveraging on-demand Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) with Next.js and Vercel, we optimized their site to handle increasing demands, delivering measurable improvements in efficiency, costs, and performance.

The Challenge

As the client’s website expanded to tens of thousands of pages, their existing static site generation model struggled to keep up. Every content update triggered a full-site rebuild, resulting in inefficiencies and delays. The system generated over 200 builds daily, straining resources and slowing the time it took for new content to go live. Hosting expenses continued to rise, exacerbated by the growing complexity of managing a large-scale platform. Additionally, cached content often lagged, resulting in slower global delivery times and diminishing the user experience. The client needed a more scalable solution to address these growing pains and ensure long-term success.

The Solution: On-Demand ISR

We implemented on-demand Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), a Next.js feature that allows individual pages to regenerate based on content changes, eliminating the need for full-site rebuilds. This shift transformed how the platform handled updates, reducing strain on resources and delivering faster content deployment. By integrating Vercel’s advanced infrastructure, we ensured seamless compatibility and top-tier performance.

Our team also collaborated with Vercel to align our approach with their best practices, maximizing the platform’s capabilities. We introduced fine-tuned revalidation intervals to ensure frequently accessed pages were always fresh while reducing unnecessary builds for less-trafficked content. This targeted approach allowed us to maintain efficiency while enhancing the site’s overall responsiveness.

The Results

The migration to on-demand ISR delivered significant results. Daily builds were reduced by 75%, from over 200 to just 50, allowing updates to propagate faster while dramatically easing resource demands. Hosting expenses decreased by 26%, driven by a more efficient page regeneration process and streamlined system monitoring. Specific optimizations, like reducing data cache writes by 32%, further improved resource utilization and lowered operational costs.

Performance enhancements were equally impactful. Cached page delivery saw a 160% increase in fast data transfer capacity, enabling global users to access fresh content faster than ever before. Additionally, the streamlined use of server-side functions minimized unnecessary requests, optimizing infrastructure efficiency. Importantly, the Contentful integration remained seamless, ensuring the client’s team could easily manage and update content without disruption.

The Value of Partnership

Our partnership with Vercel was instrumental in achieving these outcomes. By collaborating directly with their team, we ensured that our implementation aligned with their platform’s best practices and leveraged its full potential. This collaboration not only validated our approach but also reinforced the importance of working with industry leaders to deliver scalable, future-ready solutions.

Conclusion

Shift Lab’s expertise in scalable web solutions helped this client transform their platform into an efficient, cost-effective, and high-performing digital ecosystem. The success of this project demonstrates the power of modern frameworks like Next.js, robust tools like Contentful, and strategic partnerships with platforms like Vercel.