How I Sped Up the neon.tech Homepage from ~400ms to ~90ms

I recently optimized the performance of neon.tech (by @neondatabase) homepage and cut the TTFB from ~400ms to ~90ms:

📊 (TTFB numbers via @SpeedVitals)

Now, let's dive into magical changes below one by one:

• 1. Moved Real-Time Logic to Middleware
• 2. Removed Page Revalidation
• 3. Added Shared Cache Headers on Vercel

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1. Moved Real-Time Logic to Middleware

Previously, every request was SSR'd just to check if a user should be redirected to console.neon.tech.

Now, this logic runs in a lightweight middleware using Next.js middleware, which performs runtime checks much more efficiently.

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2. Removed Page Revalidation

Disabled revalidation logic on the homepage and its alias /home:

- export const revalidate = 60;
+ export const revalidate = false;

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3. Added Shared Cache Headers on Vercel

Configured the cache headers in vercel.json to enable shared cache responses:

{
  "source": "/",
  "headers": [
    {
      "key": "Cache-Control",
      "value": "max-age=0, s-maxage=31536000"
    }
  ]
},
{
  "source": "/home",
  "headers": [
    {
      "key": "Cache-Control",
      "value": "max-age=0, s-maxage=31536000"
    }
  ]
}

---

🌍 Global Performance Results

And that did the trick! Here's how the latency now looks globally (via @OpenStatusHQ):

Summary

With just a few key changes:

• Middleware instead of SSR
• No revalidation
• Smart caching headers

…we got the homepage blazing fast!