Vercel Migration Cuts Build Times 95% for Extra Space Storage
Extra Space Storage, the largest self-storage company in the U.S., manages over 3,800 stores nationwide. Their engineering team relied on public websites and kiosks as primary customer acquisition channels, but a legacy architecture created bottlenecks that slowed feature development and time-to-market. After migrating to Vercel, the company saw a 95% decrease in build times and gained more stable pre-production environments.
From Bottlenecks to Branch Deployments
The move began with smaller projects—the kiosk platform and annual reports—before the team committed to migrating their flagship site following the acquisition of Life Storage in 2023. The transition was seamless: Extra Space Storage stood up the new site on Vercel and controlled traffic through DNS routing when ready. There was no need to revert to their previous environment.
Our success with the Life Storage site showed us how much we could gain from Vercel. Moving extraspace.com was a no-brainer.
Vercel's per-branch environments have become central to their workflow, allowing the team to test changes in isolation before merging rather than relying on shared environments.
Testing is so much easier now. We no longer rely on shared environments, and the speed of deployments is incredible.
Streamlined Frontend Architecture
Extra Space Storage's frontend now runs on a Next.js application powered by Vercel's global Edge Network. Key architectural decisions include:
- Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) for primary sales flow pages, serving pages quickly while refreshing stale content in the background
- Edge Middleware for routing and cookie-based personalization
- Next.js configuration options for redirects and rewrites
ISR proved especially valuable during production deployments, preventing performance degradation when redeploying code. The checkout process behaves like a single-page application, optimizing for speed where SEO isn't a priority, while other pages maintain strict SEO standards for search visibility.
Handling High-Volume Traffic
The site handles approximately 250,000 page views daily and drives $1.7 million in revenue per day. With Vercel managing caching and serverless functions, Extra Space Storage no longer deals with the overhead of complex infrastructure management. The company reports improved site reliability and stability, and with Vercel handling the infrastructure layer, the engineering team can focus on delivering features rather than maintaining their platform.
While Extra Space Storage is still exploring the full range of Vercel's capabilities, the migration has already transformed their development workflow. The platform's integrated features have unlocked new efficiencies, allowing more frequent releases and faster responses to customer feedback.
