Migrating from Next.js + Go to Laravel: A Real-World Case Study of bangkerja.com

As software engineers, we often face the challenging decision of whether to rewrite an existing application. In this post, I'll share my recent experience migrating bangkerja.com - a Chinese-language job platform in Indonesia - from a Next.js + Golang stack to Laravel, and the surprising benefits we discovered along the way.

The Initial Architecture

The original bangkerja platform was built using a split architecture:

• Frontend: Next.js (React-based)
• Backend: Golang services

While this architecture is popular and has its merits, we encountered several challenges:

1. Code Duplication: Without a strict RPC framework like tRPC between Go and Next.js, we found ourselves maintaining similar validation logic and types in both codebases. This led to synchronization issues and increased debugging complexity.

2. Component Style Management: React components had their styles tightly coupled, which meant migrating them required careful extraction and reimplementation.

The Migration Journey

Why Laravel?

Laravel offered several compelling advantages for our use case:

• Unified codebase (frontend + backend)
• Strong conventions and opinions that speed up development
• Rich ecosystem of tools and packages
• Built-in view components through Blade

Tackling the Frontend Migration

One of our main challenges was migrating the React components to Laravel's Blade system. However, Laravel's modern frontend stack made this surprisingly manageable:

<x-job-card :job="$job" @click="showDialog"/>

The combination of Blade components and Alpine.js provided the reactivity we needed, while Livewire handled more complex interactive features that would typically require a full JavaScript framework.

Performance Concerns and Laravel Octane

A major concern during migration was performance. PHP's shared-nothing architecture means each request typically requires bootstrapping the entire application. This is where Laravel Octane became our secret weapon.

Octane fundamentally changes how Laravel applications run by:

• Persisting the application in memory between requests
• Using high-performance application servers (FrankenPHP or Swoole)
• Handling concurrent requests more efficiently
• Maintaining warm instances of services and singletons

The results were impressive:

• Response times dropped significantly
• Server resource usage decreased by approximately 50%
• Built-in Caddy server provided automatic SSL certification management

The Results

The migration yielded several unexpected benefits:

1. Codebase Reduction: We achieved an impressive 80% reduction in total code size by eliminating duplicated logic and leveraging Laravel's built-in features.

2. Resource Efficiency: The new system handles the same traffic load with half the server resources, resulting in significant cost savings.

3. Developer Experience: The unified codebase has made debugging and feature implementation much more straightforward.

Lessons Learned

This project challenged some of my preconceptions about dynamic vs. static typing. Coming from a strongly-typed background, I was initially skeptical about moving to PHP. However, Laravel's strong conventions and tooling demonstrated that:

1. Dynamic languages can be just as maintainable when paired with proper architecture and frameworks
2. The productivity gains from opinionated frameworks can outweigh the benefits of strict typing in certain scenarios
3. Modern PHP performance can match or exceed that of traditionally "faster" languages when properly optimized

Conclusion

The successful migration of bangkerja.com demonstrates that sometimes, less is more in software architecture. By choosing a more integrated, opinionated framework, we were able to reduce complexity, improve performance, and create a more maintainable system.

You can check out the final result at bangkerja.com, where Chinese speakers in Indonesia can find relevant job opportunities.