Case Study: Migrating a Legacy Monolith to Next.js

Complete rewrites are rarely a good business decision. When tasked with modernizing a 6-year-old e-commerce platform, we chose the 'Strangler Fig' pattern. We spun up a Next.js frontend to handle new marketing pages while proxying API requests to the old PHP backend. This post details the load balancing challenges, the SEO improvements we saw within weeks, and the difficult conversation we had about when to stop supporting IE11.