Restructuring: Developing Luxury Property Bookings with Next.js
Project Overview
In the competitive business of India’s luxury property market, one of the leading chains with over 500 properties across more than 50 destinations was facing a tough challenge. Along with serving more than 300,000 guests and experiencing considerable growth, the company’s digital presence was badly impacted by an outdated website built on Angular. This not only affected the user interface and performance but also cost a decrease in guest engagement and booking conversions. Their need was to renovate the website for improved performance and faster loading speed. So, the project responsibility was to renovate the website using Next.js with PHP as the backend to improve user experience and performance.
Challenges
The primary challenges appeared during the website repair and renovation task included:
- Responsiveness and Cross-Browser Support: The existing website was struggling hard to provide a consistent user experience across different devices and browsers. That was directly affecting their user engagement.
- Familiarity with Next.js: The next challenge was lack of expertise. Their development team had limited knowledge of Next.js. This challenge added another task of learning with extra efforts in the project when it was at an early stage.
- Feature Planning and Execution: Challenges didn’t end here, as misalignments between the design documents and actual product features created confusion. The confusion increased the complications of this development process.
- SEO and User Analytics: We addressed a critical SEO challenge by transitioning from a static to a dynamic sitemap.xml file for our project.
Solutions
- Adopting Next.js and Modern Technologies: By developing from Angular to Next.js and implementing Material UI for the front-end, the team could use the latest web development practices for improved performance and user experience.
- Increased Responsiveness: The next solution was provided by using Material UI’s responsive design principles, for example- breakpoints and media queries. This made sure the website provided a flawless experience across all device sizes and browsers.
- Streamlined Development Process: The team completely dedicated their time to learning Next.js and integrated Prismic for the best-in-class page building. This dedication allowed for better flexibility in content management. For backend operations, PHP Laravel was chosen because of its advancement and user- friendliness.
- Collaborative Planning and Testing: Implementing a structured process for sprint planning, design documentation, and feature alignment helped a lot to synchronize the development efforts. BrowserStack was used for external device testing. That ensured compatibility across different devices and browsers.
- Updation and Implementation: This update ensures that our dynamic pages, such as property and city pages, are included and updated promptly. Leveraging a NPM package named “sitemap,” we have implemented a custom script that generates the XML file dynamically during each build process. This solution guarantees that new properties and cities are automatically added to the sitemap, enhancing website visibility and SEO performance. We also revolutionized our business strategy by implementing Google Analytics and Clevertap events across all pages.
Results
The development/transition of the website left a significant change for the luxury property chain. Key achievements of this project included:
- Improved Page Speed: Migrating to Next.js effectively improved the website’s loading times. That directly impacted user satisfaction and SEO rankings.
- Increased Engagement and Conversions: The redesigned user interface and flawless user flow led to high level of engagement rates and booking conversions.
- Responsive Design: The website can now provide a consistent and engaging user experience with all devices or browsers. This response improved its accessibility to a different audience.
Conclusion
The process of development through transition to Next.js for the luxury property chain’s website was not just a technological upgrade but a strategic step to align the company’s digital presence. It was all the goal of this project along with its premium branding. By effectively solving all the challenges through dedicated learning, implementing new technologies, and increasing collaboration between development and product teams, the project expressed how modern web development practices could effectively upgrade the online customer experience. This case study highlights the importance of responsiveness, performance, and a flawless user interface in approaching digital success in the hospitality industry.
