Maistra.com has over 15,000 high-resolution images across their site–and still manages high page performance scores and near-perfect Core Web Vitals.

This wasn’t always the case. Until recently, Maistra’s Hospitality’s site was built and deployed on a monolith PHP application. It was slow to load, had a massive codebase that was hard to maintain, and most importantly–it was really hard to customize the UI.

Maistra is one of the leading tourist companies in Croatia, and manages dozens of sites in internationally sought-after destinations. With a global clientbase and a competitive market, Maistra needed to make their site stand out, and deliver an exceptional experience for visitors. They turned to web development agency PM d.o.o. to migrate off the monolith and onto a stack that would help them achieve the following goals:

• Increase conversion rates and overall digital revenue
• Increase website traffic and online brand experience
• Go to market quickly
• Future-proof the site with tools and processes that scale

With PM d.o.o.’s and and 01 Content&Technology-C3 Croatia's assistance, Maistra built a new site with Netlify, Hugo, Cloudinary, and Vue JS. The result? The site is 25% faster, even with its high number of videos and images, and they’re able to ship site changes quickly with a git-based workflow that developers love.

A MACH Stack for the Hospitality industry

As an image-heavy site, Cloudinary is an important tool for Maistra. Images are necessary on a tourism site, and were slowing down the performance on the monolith. After the migration, Maistra managed to speed up loading time for the site by 25%, and improve the Google speed test from 65% to 100%.

Some other best-of-breed microservices that Maistra relies upon include:

• Algolia for search
• Azure B2C for authentication
• VueJS for their JavaScript framework
• Netlify for building and deploying

These tools allowed them to customize the frontend to provide a high-end experience for their visitors, without needing to use a monolith or building this functionality in house.

Mixing Legacy and Microservice Technology for a Fast Go-To-Market

A composable architecture enables developers to select best-of-breed tools for almost any service. But it also allows legacy technology to sit alongside these tools, so long as it’s delivered via microservice. To hit their launch goals, PM d.o.o. decided to integrate some legacy technology alongside the best-of-breed API-based tools they selected.

This allowed them to take the initial leaps towards a composable architecture while keeping their old booking engine, so they didn’t have to worry about migrating all their legacy systems to improve the site UI. In a purely monolithic architecture, where the frontend logic is connected to the presentation layer, this wouldn’t have been possible.

Netlify’s CI/CD Tools Enables a NoOps Approach

Unlike with their monolithic solution, build environments are extremely easy to create with Netlify. Netlify's CI/CD infrastructure, Netlify Build, enables unlimited identical code environments simply by creating a branch in the code repository and informing Netlify to build and server these additional branches.

“Using Netlify means we don’t have any administrators, all is done by Developers. Setting up environments is super fast and easy… We managed to develop more than 100 templates in less than one year with no DevOps thanks to the Netlify environment” - Urban Pfeifer, CTO of PM d.o.o.

For the Maistra team, this made development fast and easy. They could release with confidence, knowing that what they saw in each Deploy Preview would exactly match what they saw in production, once the code was committed.

Maistra uses a couple other Netlify features to make their site successful:

• Netlify Edge Functions to choose which server to deliver from
• Netlify HP Edge for fast delivery

For more information about the agency that helped deliver this experience, learn more about PM d.o.o. in the Netlify Partner Directory.