How Vercel and Next.js keep Rippling on their rising path to success

Rippling scales a 600-page marketing site with one engineer and a modern frontend stack

Rippling’s HR platform went from $13M to $100M in revenue in two years, and its marketing site had to keep pace. As the site grew past 600 pages, Web Engineer Robert Schneiderman found that a fullstack WordPress setup could no longer support the speed at which stakeholders wanted to ship updates — nor the performance customers expected. The team moved to a headless WordPress CMS paired with Next.js and Vercel to decouple content management from site delivery.

That architecture lets non-technical teams move without waiting on engineering. Over 90% of site changes are now deployed by stakeholders immediately, freeing Schneiderman to focus on performance and user experience rather than churning out routine content updates.

On-demand ISR removes the build bottleneck

A key enabler is on-demand Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR). Schneiderman can publish a change in WordPress and push it live without triggering a full build or manually wiring a CI/CD pipeline. Updates propagate through Vercel in as little as 300ms, so customers never see stale versions of the site.

ISR also keeps build times flat as the application grows, since page generation can be deferred until a request comes in or an API is called — instead of bundling all rendering into the build phase. Schneiderman describes the feature as a “game-changing” improvement and says he hasn’t considered another framework since adopting the stack.

A lean team with room to invest

The efficiency gains ripple outward. Rippling’s engineering manager, William Borges, can steer resources toward backend work rather than babysitting a slow frontend release process. With a one-developer web team, the company retains the flexibility to make tooling choices that support its growth without adding headcount just to manage site updates.