Cruise Critic Cuts Build Times and Page Weight After Moving to Next.js and Vercel
Cruise Critic, a Tripadvisor subsidiary that draws more than six million visitors per month, has overhauled its application stack to keep pace with growing traffic. The company’s engineering team abandoned a tightly coupled, monolithic PHP application that made even minor changes require complex rewrites, adopting Next.js and Vercel instead.
The shift produced dramatic gains in both developer velocity and end-user performance. Build times dropped from 30 minutes to less than eight, and the team now ships to production multiple times per day — a stark contrast to the days or weeks deployments previously took. Page download time fell by 85%, while page size decreased by nearly 100%.
"The most valuable feature of Vercel is that our team can focus on building products rather than worrying about infrastructure." — Robert Norman, Principal Software Engineer, Cruise Critic
By offloading infrastructure concerns to Vercel, Cruise Critic’s engineers can iterate more freely, delivering features in a more agile fashion and serving travelers with a faster, lighter site experience.
