How we migrated our website from Handlebars to React in 12 weeks

Plaid, a financial services technology provider, migrated its website from Handlebars to React in 12 weeks using an automated tool that allowed incremental migration while maintaining regular feature work and maintenance. The company's rapid expansion demanded faster iterations, more experimentation, and localized content. The legacy website was built with the Handlebars templating language and flat file generator for compiling to static HTML, which made maintenance arduous and prevented optimal serving of market-specific content. By migrating to Next.js, Plaid achieved a fully extensible, zero configuration, production ready framework that allowed the team to hit the ground running. The migration process involved building a compiler to handle most of the migration for them and manually migrating only a small number of complex pages.