April 2023 Summaries

Vercel Web Analytics is now generally available, providing insights on top pages, referrers, and user demographics, as well as new functionality like filtering and custom events. This feature is available on all plans and offers a privacy-friendly tracking option using first-party analytics, which identifies users by a hash created from the incoming request. Setting up Web Analytics requires only three steps, resulting in faster page loading speeds compared to Google Analytics. The component also integrates seamlessly with popular frameworks like Next.js and React, allowing for more seamless data ingestion and reporting. Custom event tracking is available for Pro and Enterprise users, enabling them to track specific events like newsletter signups or CTAs, providing deeper insights into user behavior and helping build better products.

The technology-driven construction management company CORE Construction has successfully implemented Operational Excellence (OPEX) by leveraging innovative solutions delivered through their partnership with Vercel. The company's Business Insights tool, initially built on AWS, was later migrated to Vercel, providing a more stable and reliable pipeline that enabled them to build a custom, mission-critical BI tool for their employees and contractors. This tool has improved collaboration, reduced friction, and increased transparency across the company, allowing them to work faster, deliver high-quality data-driven construction solutions, and achieve OPEX. The partnership with Vercel has also streamlined CORE's builds process, reducing build time from 30 minutes to just 14 minutes, enabling the company to innovate and drive forward in the industry.

Gearbox, a five-person team, crafts stunning sites and apps while empowering clients to retain control over their brand through a "dev-first approach". They use Next.js and Vercel for their solutions, even for clients who may not be ready for a headless stack. The team initially chose Gatsby but eventually found Next.js and Vercel more efficient and powerful. They value security, using Vercel's Edge Network to manage blog redirects and replicate content globally. With Vercel Preview Deployments, they can get to production faster and review code more efficiently. Gearbox has been all-in on Vercel and Next.js for almost three years, reshaping their development workflow and experiencing benefits with each incremental migration.

In the world of e-commerce, Commerce-UI specializes in creating optimized and performant experiences for design-driven brands using Next.js and Vercel. They help clients like Lift Foils discover headless commerce while providing a seamless shopping experience globally. The team understands the importance of site speed and uses Vercel to keep sites fast and responsive even when rendering heavy content. Commerce-UI invested in maintaining a full DevOps team to serve their old sites, but now relies on Next.js and Vercel as a performant pair. By using Edge Middleware, they helped Lift Foils create dedicated pages for each region, which were then localized and personalized. This allowed the brand to provide a fast and seamless experience for customers everywhere. Commerce-UI also focuses on improving the developer experience by providing tools like Preview Deployments and webhooks that trigger a site rebuild when Shopify configurations change. These features decrease time to production and offer out-of-the-box support for modern tech stacks.

Wunderman Thompson, a global digital agency, uses Atomic Design principles, a headless CMS, a monorepo workflow with Turborepo, and Vercel's serverless platform to create an efficient developer workflow. They achieve this by choosing the right framework, such as Next.js or SvelteKit, which offers full stack access, component-based architecture, optimized performance, efficient rendering, enhanced developer experience, and adaptive deployment. By applying Atomic Design principles, they create a unified design system that keeps all sites up-to-date and avoids inconsistencies. The use of a headless CMS manages data with a single source of truth, while a monorepo workflow stores code consistency across client websites. Turborepo improves the speed of working with the large monorepo. Vercel's native integrations manage infrastructure, preview deployments, and serverless scaling, enabling seamless development and deployment experiences. This composable workflow delivers impressive results for Wunderman Thompson, improving developer productivity by 10x and slashing costs by 25x compared to a monolithic solution like WordPress.

mmm.page`, a website creation platform, initially used Amazon S3 for its single page application but quickly outgrew it due to limitations such as poor SEO and difficulty in scaling. The company turned to Vercel, leveraging Server-Side Rendering (SSR), ease of deployment, and custom domain support to manage its scale, monetize offerings, and innovate. With Vercel's support, `mmm.page` has been able to quickly set up custom domains, improve performance with caching, and reduce latency by utilizing SSR. This has enabled the company to rapidly spin up new features, meet user needs, and scale along with its growing user base of over 30,000 users.

Vercel Edge Config is a new solution for managing configuration data in the cloud designed to be ultra-fast, reliable, and scalable. It enables dynamic data storage alongside functions, ensuring that data is always available instantly, no matter where users are located. This allows companies to deploy feature flags and experiments at the edge with zero latency, improving performance and effectiveness. Edge Config has a simple API to get started quickly, and it's optimized for fast and inexpensive reads and infrequent writes, making it perfect for managing experimentation and configuration data in modern web applications. It also integrates well with popular tools such as Statsig and Split, enabling near-zero latency feature management and experimentation capabilities.

Vercel has formed a deep partnership with AWS to accelerate innovation through serverless computing, providing customers with streamlined procurement, security validation, simplified billing, and flexible pricing. This integration allows anyone with an AWS account to onboard and build on Vercel in just a few clicks, offering features like Serverless Functions with AWS Lambda, Comments on Preview Deployments, and Frontend Observability. The partnership enables developers to harness the power of serverless computing, growing their businesses with flexibility, performance, and reliability. With this milestone, Vercel's users can benefit from ironclad security practices, cost analysis, and subscription management, making it easier for them to stay competitive in the market.