Beginning life several years ago as a bootstrapped passion project by its founder Rick van Haasteren, SiteGuru has since received numerous industry accolades for its impactful yet simplified step-by-step SEO guidance.

Created and coded over a period of 7 years, SiteGuru is one developer’s labor of love. When Rick van Haasteren’s powerful SaaS for simplifying SEO started to take off, two things became clear: it needed scalability and a future-proof backend technology.

There were two options on the table: update to the latest version of CakePHP or migrate to a more modern framework, like Laravel. While there’s nothing wrong with CakePHP per se, because it’s a slightly older technology, SiteGuru struggled to find the devs needed to support it. It also required Rick to perform time-consuming manual updates.

The alternative? Learn a new backend framework. The problem with that was time (or a lack of it); Rick needed to focus on building a business – not rebuilding the backend of his SaaS. Instead of learning a new framework, outsourcing to an expert seemed a much better option. And that’s where Proshore came in.

Leveraging our specialty in Laravel development, Rick was able to put the migration of SiteGuru in a safe pair of hands, whilst he focussed on scaling his business. We provided Rick with the Laravel expertise and the development capacity needed to make the transition from CakePHP with minimal interruption to services.

Separating out apps into various microservices and rebuilding the whole thing in phases meant we could run the new system and the legacy system simultaneously, ensuring end-users experienced minimal disruption to services. It was business as usual for customers.

Using Laravel Vapor – a serverless deployment platform for the AWS Cloud –  the migration was virtually seamless. At the time of writing, we’ve migrated around 70-80% of the services. This means Rick and SiteGuru no longer need to manage servers – that’s taken care of by their Cloud Service Provider (CSP).