2 min read
Parachute is a modern lifestyle brand that offers thoughtfully designed products using premium quality materials. The engineering team initially deployed the Parachute site to Shopify because of its quick templates and SEO benefits. But after seven and a half years of rapid growth, they realized they’d outgrown the out-of-the-box offering and needed a solution that gave them more customization and flexibility—without slowing down their site or sacrificing SEO.
Moving to Next.js gave the team the flexibility to choose between static or dynamic pages, allowing them to choose the best app architecture for their customers’ needs. From there, the move to Vercel’s development and deployment platform was the obvious choice.
“With Next.js, we were able to conduct a complete migration from our existing React website in less than a month, including testing. We then moved to Vercel in less than an hour” —Neel Rao, Principal Software Architect, Parachute
Vercel leverages the power of AWS to provide a fully managed infrastructure that optimizes performance and scalability for its users. Static assets reside on the highly reliable and scalable AWS S3 storage, while dynamic Serverless Functions are seamlessly deployed and executed on AWS Lambda. This entire integration is orchestrated entirely by Vercel, eliminating the complexities of infrastructure management for its users. Vercel's global edge network and intelligent caching system work in tandem to route and cache requests efficiently. This ensures that end users receive content, whether static assets from S3 or dynamic content from Lambda functions, with minimal latency from the nearest edge location.
Vercel enabled a number of significant improvements to Parachute’s workflow from automating highly dynamic aspects of its site to providing preview access for stakeholders across the business. With the ability to seamlessly integrate all of its favorite tools, Parachute was able to have the best of both worlds and build its site just the way it wanted—including retaining Shopify’s headless commerce and pairing Contentful with Vercel’s Incremental Static Generation feature to keep the site fast and content fresh.
Speed with scale is possible. Parachute was able to not only migrate to Next.js and Vercel in a month, but it also improved page load times by 60%.
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