How Plex 6x their impressions deploying Next.js on Vercel

Posted by

Peri Langlois

Product Marketing Manager

Plex is a TV platform with live and on-demand content that streams action, comedy, movies, news, and more 24/7. In 2021 they set out to create a new unified foundation to build their web experiences for years to come.

With the goal of prioritizing user experience, Plex leveraged Next.js native optimizations like Server-side rendering (SSR) pages, on-demand Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), and Edge Middleware, ultimately improving their Google search ranking and increasing traffic after the relaunch.

Their site, watch.plex.tv, was originally deployed on Kubernetes auto-scaling clusters. While the performance met their business requirements, the developer experience led to wasted resources and headaches. By refactoring their site to Next.js on Vercel, Plex decreased the number of lines in their codebase by roughly 40%, making it faster to develop new features.