Plenti’s Composable Overhaul: One Engineer, a Next.js Frontend, and a Clean Break from WordPress
Plenti, an Australian consumer lending and investment company, began a rebrand and IPO process in 2020—at which point the company’s legacy architecture became a liability. The firm had been running on a monolithic WordPress stack, and with over $900m in loans funded and more than 55,000 borrowers, the website needed to project the reliability and polish that financial services customers expect.
The solution was a move to a composable architecture: a Next.js frontend deployed on Vercel, with Strapi serving as the headless CMS. What’s notable is the size of the team behind the migration: Plenti’s Software Engineer Matt Milburn handled the entire transition alone. He credits the technology choices for making that feasible. “I tried to weigh every option possible, but Next.js ended up being the obvious choice. It just looks so nice, and gets you going so fast. You start building what you want to build right away, with zero configuration,” Milburn says.
Why Composability Beat the Monolith
For Plenti, the decision was less about following a trend and more about eliminating friction. Every page on the site was redesigned, refactored, and rewritten as part of the rebrand. Milburn’s description of the shift is blunt: “I’m happy we are no longer messing with our old monolithic WordPress stack. It’s total freedom.”
The composable setup separates content management from presentation, letting the team optimize the user-facing layer without touching the backend. For a company preparing for an IPO, that separation also made the site easier to audit and refine from a performance standpoint.
Automating Deployments with the Vercel API
Among the tools Milburn relies on is the Vercel API, a REST interface for interacting with the platform programmatically. He used it to build a plugin for Strapi that triggers deployments automatically. That integration removes a manual step from the publishing workflow, which matters when one engineer is responsible for the entire stack.
The API isn’t just a convenience; it reflects how Vercel is designed to be automated and extended. For a small team, plugins and integrations reduce the operational overhead of maintaining a production frontend.
Real User Data Over Lab Simulations
Performance measurement is another area where Milburn leans on Vercel’s tooling. He specifically points to Vercel Analytics and its Real Experience Score (RES). Unlike Lighthouse—which approximates user experience through simulated lab tests—RES derives its grade from web vitals collected on the actual devices of Plenti’s visitors.
“RES helps us narrow down a variety of optimizations we can make proactively,” Milburn says. The advantage is clear: the score reflects how the site performs under real-world conditions, not under idealized testing parameters. That allows Plenti to make targeted fixes based on evidence from its actual audience.
The takeaway from Plenti’s experience is that a composable frontend doesn’t require a large team to execute—given the right platform and framework. Milburn summarizes the sentiment: “using Next.js and Vercel together? Of course. They make the thing. It’s zero-configuration.”
