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Case 02 · press · 2024

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.

Project
TopGear India CMS
Client
Exhibit Magazine India Pvt. Ltd.
What
CMS migration and modernization
Role
Lead engineer

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.

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.
The TopGear India home page on desktop: the BBC TopGear India Magazine header, section navigation, a featured motorcycle story and Latest News.
The live product at topgearmag.in

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

page load time, before → after
1–3 min → 3 s
bounce rate, before → after
70% → 30%

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

Where this work happened

  • Working with teams in 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.

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