Prince of Egypt

The inherited website had problems on both sides of the publishing process.

Content changes triggered builds that often took upwards of 40 minutes. Inefficient loops through CMS data made generating the site unnecessarily heavy, leaving editors waiting before they could check whether an update had appeared correctly.

Visitors faced a different set of delays. Large images, a heavy homepage video and JavaScript requests carrying substantial payloads slowed the site down.

Mobile booking was particularly difficult. The ticketing iframe did not fit the screen properly causing issues for users. Accessibility had also been omitted from the original implementation. Fixing these issues required work across most of the codebase.

What began as a refactor became a near-total rebuild. We reworked the React components and Gatsby's page-generation logic, retaining little of the inherited implementation.

We changed how the site queried CMS content through GraphQL. Initial queries identified the relevant entry IDs, then each page requested the fields it needed. This replaced the heavy traversal of large amounts of data during every build.

We also moved content requests that had been running in visitors' browsers into the build process. The resulting pages delivered pre-generated content, reducing the amount of fetching required when someone visited the site.