# TopGear India CMS > A magazine CMS moved from CodeIgniter on shared hosting to Laravel on Google Cloud: page loads from 1–3 min → 3 s. - Page: https://deependra.in/work/topgear-india-cms - Type: Case study 02 of 6 - Last updated: 2026-11-02 - Author: [Deependra Vishwakarma](https://deependra.in/about), senior software engineer in Mumbai ## Key facts - Project: TopGear India CMS - Client: Exhibit Magazine India Pvt. Ltd. - What: CMS migration and modernization - Role: Lead engineer - Year: 2024 - Live: https://www.topgearmag.in ## The brief behind TopGear India CMS I rebuilt a motoring magazine's content management system, moving it from CodeIgniter on shared hosting to Laravel on Google Cloud with Redis caching and an edge CDN, without interrupting daily publishing. A busy editorial site: daily stories, galleries and reviews, traffic spikes whenever a car launches, and editors who can't stop publishing for a migration. It was a CodeIgniter to Laravel CMS migration: a rewrite on new infrastructure with every URL kept and the newsroom publishing throughout, and the general method is in my [staged migration playbook](https://deependra.in/writing/codeigniter-to-laravel-staged-migration). ## What constrained the work The legacy CodeIgniter code on shared hosting was slowest exactly when it mattered, during traffic spikes. The modernization had to happen while the newsroom kept publishing every day. ## How TopGear India CMS is built - **A full rewrite to Laravel**, keeping the content model and URLs the editors and search engines already knew. - **Google Cloud instead of shared hosting**, with infrastructure that could be scaled and monitored. - **Redis caching and an edge CDN** in front of the application, so most page views never touch the database. - **An editor-first CMS**, rebuilt around the newsroom's real publishing workflow. - **Queries and indexes fixed at the source.** The slow pages came from slow SQL; the queries were rewritten and the tables indexed for how the site actually reads them. - **Images sized for the page.** Every image is served at the size it is shown, instead of full-size originals. ## Pictures - The TopGear India home page on desktop: the BBC TopGear India Magazine header, section navigation, a featured motorcycle story and Latest News. ## Trade-offs and why - A full rewrite instead of incremental patches: more work up front, but patching the old stack had stopped paying off. - Caching aggressively means planning invalidation carefully, so published changes appear promptly without purging everything. - Keeping every URL stable limited some structural changes, and protected years of search traffic. ## What changed, measured - **1–3 min → 3 s**: page load time, before → after. Definition: Load time of the home page and the article category pages before and after the rebuild (new stack, optimized SQL queries and indexes, Google Cloud, properly sized images). - **70% → 30%**: bounce rate, before → after. Definition: Bounce rate in Google Analytics before and after the rebuild. Page load time on the home and category pages fell from 1–3 min → 3 s. Bounce rate fell from 70% → 30%, and traffic grew. Publishing moved from hours to minutes for the editorial team. The site now runs on cloud infrastructure that can be scaled and monitored. ## Lessons from TopGear India CMS When the platform is the problem, a clean migration is cheaper than endless patches. The big gains came from architecture (cloud, caching, CDN), not from micro-optimizing code. Editors are users too. The CMS was only a success once publishing became easier as well as faster. ## Technologies used Laravel, CodeIgniter (legacy), Vue.js, MySQL, Redis, CDN, Google Cloud ## Services used - [Legacy modernization](https://deependra.in/services/build/legacy-modernization) (Product engineering): Move an aging system to a modern stack without stopping the business. - [Performance and Core Web Vitals audit](https://deependra.in/services/scale/performance-audit) (Performance and reliability): Find out in five working days exactly why your application is slow, and what to fix first. ## Where this work happened - [India](https://deependra.in/markets/india) (Mumbai, Bengaluru): A senior software engineer in Mumbai for Indian startups and product teams, on the same clock as you and close enough to meet in person when a session is worth it. It is for founders with a consumer launch to scale, a media or publishing platform to keep fast, or a PHP system to modernise. ## Related writing - [TopGear India: moving a publishing CMS from CodeIgniter to Laravel while the newsroom kept publishing](https://deependra.in/writing/topgear-india-cms-migration-case-study) (2 November 2026): The decisions behind one CMS migration: a full rewrite, the content model and URLs kept, the speed found in SQL, caching and images, and an editor-first CMS. - [CodeIgniter to Laravel: a staged migration playbook](https://deependra.in/writing/codeigniter-to-laravel-staged-migration) (2 November 2026): How to move a live CodeIgniter or plain-PHP application to Laravel in reversible stages, keeping every URL and the business running. - [Laravel performance in 2026: a production playbook](https://deependra.in/writing/laravel-performance-2026-production-guide) (2 November 2026): What actually makes Laravel applications fast in production, from queries and caching to queues and Octane. --- Cite as: Deependra Vishwakarma, "TopGear India CMS", https://deependra.in/work/topgear-india-cms (last updated 2026-11-02). 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