From weeks to minutes: inside Hydrow’s headless rebuild

In 2022, connected-fitness company Hydrow found itself at a familiar ecommerce crossroads. Its existing stack—Shopify Liquid and WordPress—was functional, but the team needed more dynamic content capabilities and a workflow that didn’t bottleneck every update through engineering. Working with solutions partner Wunderman Thompson Commerce & Technology, Hydrow moved to a headless architecture built on Contentful, Next.js, and Vercel. The results were dramatic: content authoring time dropped from weeks to minutes, Core Web Vitals improved by 50%, and website updates became 3000% faster.

Why the legacy stack felt limiting

Hydrow’s original setup lacked integration between content and development workflows. Every content change or site update required developer support, creating delays and forcing non-technical teams to wait on engineering for even routine edits. The company wanted an ecosystem where content authors, designers, and marketers could operate independently—with instant feedback on changes, a flexible design system beyond template constraints, and no recurring inter-team support burden.

At the same time, Hydrow couldn't afford to regress. The company had worked hard to establish its ecommerce standing and needed to preserve SEO performance, brand consistency, and site speed throughout any overhaul. The new system had to let team members implement bigger ideas than the old stack allowed—without breaking anything.

A headless stack with managed infrastructure

The team selected Contentful as its headless CMS, citing a straightforward migration path from WordPress and Shopify, high scalability, and creative freedom beyond traditional templating. Contentful also offers a managed integration with Vercel and Next.js, plus webhooks that connect directly to Next.js Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) for real-time content updates.

Vercel handles the underlying infrastructure: static assets like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS live on AWS S3, while non-static assets such as Serverless Functions run on AWS Lambda. Vercel’s global edge network routes and caches requests to the appropriate assets, ensuring fast content delivery worldwide.

“At Wunderman Thompson Commerce & Technology we chose Contentful along with Next.js and Vercel in order to leverage the tools' robust feature sets and provide Hydrow with a headless stack that was not only fast but extremely scalable.”

Robin Rogowski, Senior Lead Software Engineer

Revalidation, previews, and edge execution

Next.js provides a separate frontend architecture that queries Contentful data via APIs, letting developers hook up content wherever needed without entangling backend data processes. ISR combines static-site generation and server-side rendering to optimize build times and content delivery. Since Contentful content is server-rendered rather than generated at build time, Hydrow can scale dynamic content without affecting build times. And because those pages are cached as static pages, users get the fastest possible delivery.

The real win is in the authoring experience. When an author presses publish in Contentful, a webhook tells the Next.js frontend to re-cache the content by path. Content updates appear in real time for authors and users alike. Hydrow also tuned the webhook to trigger revalidation at the page level only, further improving performance.

For previewing unpublished changes, Hydrow uses a dedicated Vercel Preview Environment with its own .env variables. This gives marketing and business teams a production-like space to review content updates before publishing—on any device—without cluttering the production branch or relying on developers.

“Preview Deployments have allowed the members of the marketing and business teams to set up content updates and see how they will look in production without publishing the changes. The teams are now able to set up the next round of content updates a couple days in advance which in turn allows them to rapidly publish the changes when a promo or marketing campaign starts or ends.”

Reuben Kabel, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Hydrow

Vercel’s collaboration tools—per-deploy preview URLs and commenting—round out the publishing suite. Authors no longer have to guess how content will render at publish time, and developers aren't constantly pulled into content work.

On the performance side, Edge Middleware executes code before a user request is processed. Hydrow uses this to run deep experiments and make real-time adjustments with its customer base. The pattern supports personalized experiences—dynamically serving each customer the most relevant content—and enables latency-free A/B testing. Edge Network caching for ISR means dynamic content delivers as fast as static content, while reducing server resource usage and infrastructure costs.

“With Vercel, Next.js, and Contentful we finally have that feeling of: 'it just works.' We've totally transformed our content authoring experience.”

Reuben Kabel

What changed after the migration

The shift produced measurable gains across performance, collaboration, and operations:

  • Core Web Vitals improved by 50%, moving Hydrow from the bottom 25% to the top 25% of ecommerce sites.
  • Authoring time fell from weeks to minutes, mostly by removing cross-team dependencies.
  • Content updates became genuinely real-time—publishing is now a one-step action with no waiting on revalidation.
  • Dynamic content serves as fast as static content, thanks to edge network caching of ISR pages.
  • Marketing teams preview production-ready content in advance, and can schedule updates for the moment a campaign starts or ends.
  • Developers are free to work on value-added features. Adding new content types to the existing revalidation path is templated and simple.
  • Elastic scalability comes from Vercel’s Frontend Cloud, especially important during high-traffic events. Hydrow owns no physical architecture failure points of its own.
  • Build times are down significantly, since they no longer scale with dynamic content volume.

The stack gives Hydrow room to keep growing without rearchitecting. With authors empowered to move independently and developers focused on the product roadmap, the company now has the headroom to push its digital experience further—without the content bottlenecks that previously held it back.