Context

Aspen Dental is a U.S. healthcare organization with 1,000+ offices nationwide. The public website includes tens of thousands of pages and receives heavy traffic from search engines and crawlers, making SEO reliability and performance business-critical.

When I joined in 2022, the platform was built with Gatsby + Contentful using static site generation (SSG).

Problem

• Content updates required manual production deployments via Spinnaker
• Editors depended on engineers to publish changes
• Static builds became fragile as page count increased
• Release velocity slowed for SEO-critical updates
• Performance and crawl reliability were tied to build success

My Role

• Led frontend platform migration strategy
• Drove decisions with SEO, scale, and performance as core constraints
• Led cross-functional collaboration with content, SEO, platform, and DevOps teams
• Owned rollout quality, caching strategy, and operational reliability

Approach & Key Decisions

Next.js Pages Router + SSR

• Decoupled content publishing from CI/CD
• Enabled near real-time publishing from Contentful
• Eliminated manual production deploys for content updates
• Improved release velocity while preserving SEO stability

CloudFront caching strategy

• Cached static assets aggressively with long TTLs
• Used shorter, controlled caching for HTML/content responses
• Prevented stale content while improving repeat-visit performance

App Router migration

• Adopted React Server Components where appropriate
• Reduced client-side JavaScript on key routes
• Improved caching control and performance consistency

SEO monitoring & alerts

• Integrated SEO audit tooling (e.g., ContentKing)
• Alerted on broken pages/links and routed to content teams
• Reduced time-to-fix and engineering involvement in routine SEO cleanup