A 7-Week Release Cycle Collapses to a Day
Elkjøp, the Nordic consumer electronics retailer and subsidiary of Currys PLC, runs more than $1B in revenue through its digital properties. That scale made the shortcomings of its previous stack—Angular on self-hosted Kubernetes—increasingly costly. Slow page loads, weak SEO, and a developer experience that fought the team at every turn pushed the company toward a fundamental rebuild on Next.js and Vercel.
The results came quickly. Release cycles that once stretched to seven weeks now take a single day. Core Web Vitals improved across the board: a 93% reduction in Cumulative Layout Shift, 60% in Interaction to Next Paint, and 50% in Largest Contentful Paint. Lighthouse scores now run all green.
Framework Friction and a Custom Crawler
The old platform's problems weren't merely about performance. Deployment required a separate operations team, and even minor changes crawled through a lengthy pipeline. The Angular framework itself forced the engineering team into workarounds that consumed time better spent on features.
"It felt like we were always working against the framework instead of with it," recalls Tomas Jansson, Principal Software Engineer at Elkjøp. SEO was a particular sore spot: "We had to build workarounds like a custom crawler just to serve content to Google faster."
What Elkjøp needed was more than a platform swap. The company wanted a cultural change that let developers own their work end-to-end, from commit to production.
Ownership Through Preview Deployments
Moving to Next.js and Vercel gave Elkjøp's developers automated deployments and preview environments for every change. That removed the bottleneck of a dedicated release team and shifted verification responsibility onto the developers themselves.
"We're not waiting for things to be verified because we also believe that we can verify a lot of things ourselves," Jansson explains. "Developers should know what we're developing and be able to verify most of it ourselves."
Tomas Jansson Principal Software Engineer at Elkjøp
The team also uses feature flags in the Vercel toolbar for gradual rollouts and experiments, testing new functionality with internal users before exposing it to customers. That feedback loop smooths transitions for both internal stakeholders and shoppers.
The pace improvement, Jansson says, is stark.
"Things that previously took us 7 weeks now take a day," Tomas shares. "We're definitely moving much faster, and the technical choices have made it easier to work with the solution instead of against it."
Tomas Jansson Principal Software Engineer at Elkjøp
Consistent Rendering, Better UX
Server-side rendering in Next.js, paired with Vercel's hosting and deployment platform, gave Elkjøp faster page loads and more consistent content delivery. Those improvements translated directly to the shopper's experience, reducing unexpected layout shifts and rendering surprises.
"It's more stable, and you don't have as many surprises," Tomas explains. "Things are there when you expect them to be there, and the user experience is much better."
Tomas Jansson Principal Software Engineer at Elkjøp
Elkjøp kept its brand and visual design consistent through the migration; the gains came from the underlying architecture. With over $1 billion in digital revenue now running through the new platform, the company sees the technical overhaul as directly tied to its ability to keep that revenue flowing without interruption. The old frustrations—workarounds, waiting on release teams, and framework fights—are gone, replaced by a workflow where developers ship, verify, and iterate on their own. That shift, as much as the performance numbers, is what Elkjøp credits for its faster pace in responding to customer needs.
