How Meridian SaaS Cut Their Load Time by 80%

Meridian Analytics is a Toronto SaaS startup that sells data visualization tools to mid-market finance teams. Their marketing site and documentation portal both ran on WordPress, and for a while that was fine.

The problems started around month eighteen. Their plugin count had crept up to 22, and the admin panel took 8 to 12 seconds to load depending on the time of day. The public-facing site wasn't much better. Mobile page loads were hovering around 4.2 seconds, which was hurting their conversion rate on paid search campaigns.

The real pain point was plugin conflicts. They had a forms plugin that broke every time the SEO plugin updated. Their caching plugin would occasionally serve stale pages to logged-in users, which for a SaaS company meant people were sometimes seeing someone else's account status on the marketing site. That one was a bad day.

Their dev team had tried optimizing what they could. They stripped out three unused plugins, compressed images, added a CDN. It helped a little, but the core issue was that every page request was loading the full WordPress stack, querying a database with six years of revision history, and executing PHP for features nobody was using. The ceiling was the architecture itself.

We migrated Meridian's marketing site and docs portal to a Next.js application with static generation for the docs and server-side rendering for the dynamic marketing pages.

The first step was an audit of what WordPress was actually doing for them. About 60% of their plugins were replaceable with built-in Next.js features or simple custom code. Contact forms became a serverless function. The SEO plugin was replaced by metadata in the page components. The docs search that had been a $200/year plugin was replaced with a client-side search index built at compile time.

We ran WordPress and the new site in parallel for two weeks, using a split test to verify the performance claims before cutting over fully. The migration of content was straightforward since their posts and docs were mostly markdown with some custom shortcodes that we converted to React components.

The tricky part was their integration with HubSpot for lead tracking. The WordPress plugin had been doing that, and we needed to replicate the same tracking calls in the new stack. We ended up building a small middleware layer that handles UTM parameters and form submissions, forwarding everything to HubSpot's API directly instead of going through a plugin.

DNS cutover happened on a Sunday morning. We kept the WordPress instance running as a fallback for a month after, but never needed it.

Page load times dropped from 4.2 seconds to 0.8 seconds on mobile. The admin interface (now a simple CMS dashboard) loads in under a second.

Their infrastructure costs went down about 60% because the static pages are served from a CDN instead of hitting a PHP server on every request. The WordPress hosting was $180/month; the new setup runs on about $70/month.

Mobile conversions on their paid campaigns went up 35% in the first quarter after migration. Some of that is probably the faster load times, though they also redesigned the landing pages during the move, so it's hard to attribute precisely.

The docs site went from being the thing their support team apologized for to something they actually point people to. Search works now, pages load immediately, and the content team can update docs through a Git-based workflow that matches how their engineering team already works.