How We Helped Meilisearch to Get the Most Out of Strapi

Project context

Meilisearch is a lightning-fast search engine trusted by Hugging Face, Qogita, and Bookshop.org. Their marketing website is a central channel for educating developers, sharing community updates, and supporting adoption.

What Meilisearch Needed:

• Meilisearch’s product team is laser-focused on building its core search engine. For their website and content workflows, they needed a partner who could fully own Strapi, optimise performance, and empower marketing.

• Over a multi-year collaboration, we became Meilisearch’s embedded Strapi team. What started with performance fixes and content migrations grew into a long-term partnership where we now handle the platform end-to-end. 
• The latest milestone: the migration from Strapi v4 to v5 on Strapi Cloud.

The Challenges

• Fragmented workflows: Content split between Ghost CMS and Strapi.
  
• Developer reliance: Marketing couldn’t update pages without engineering support.
  
• Performance issues: Lighthouse score stuck at 65, build instability.
  

Future readiness: Strapi v5 was released, and the site needed to migrate safely, with thousands of content entries and dozens of content types.

The Solutions

Migration to Strapi v5 Cloud

We treated the migration as a strategic platform revamp:

• Scope: 20 collection types, 11 single types, and many components migrated.
  
• Full v5 migration: Instead of using v4CompatibilityMode, we rebuilt queries and models directly for v5, adopting documentId, flattened responses, and the new status field.
  
• Testing-first: Since Strapi Cloud lacked environment cloning, we created a Heroku staging setup (frontend + Strapi) to run the migration, test, and validate before touching production.
  
• Cleanup: Removed legacy docs, streamlined lifecycles (moved some logic like revalidate from Strapi to the frontend), and cleaned redundant content models.
  
• Future-ready: Prepared the schema for Strapi v5 features such as real-time preview and conditional fields.
  

We did a structured, safe rollout. Zero downtime, no data loss, and a leaner platform ready for growth.

‍Improvements

• Dynamic Page Builder → Marketing can edit and rearrange content without devs.
  
• Blog Migration → All Ghost CMS articles moved to Strapi, simplifying workflows under one CMS.
  
• Performance Boost → Lighthouse improved 65 → 98, with sub-second load times.
  
• Stable Deployments → Fixed Next.js build issues, re-enabled Incremental Static Regeneration.
  

Design Consistency → Unified typography and component libraries across Figma and Strapi.

‍Results

Meilisearch doesn’t have to think about its website anymore. We took over Strapi, made the site faster and cleaner, and gave the marketing team full control. They update everything on their own, while the product team stays focused on the core search engine.

• Autonomy: Marketing publishes and rearranges pages without waiting on developers
• Future-proof foundation: A clean Strapi v5 setup on Strapi Cloud, ready for new features
• Performance: Lighthouse 98/100 and page loads under one second
• Stability: Reliable deployments and better testing before every release
• Trusted partnership: We work as Meilisearch’s embedded Strapi team, not an outside vendor

Client's Feedback

“Notum handled our Strapi v4 to v5 migration end-to-end. They cleaned up our setup, improved performance, and left us with a site that’s faster, easier to manage, and ready for new Strapi features.”

— Maya Shin, Head of Marketing @ Meilisearch‍

Why Migration Matters

For any team on Strapi v4, the move to v5 is more than a technical upgrade. It’s an opportunity to:

• Clean up legacy content models and workflows.
  
• Prepare for features like preview, conditional fields, and editor-focused improvements.
  
• Reduce tech debt while empowering marketing teams.
  
• Build a stable, scalable foundation on Strapi Cloud.
  

That’s exactly what we delivered with Meilisearch, a future-ready Strapi v5 platform, built to scale alongside their community.

Moving from Ghost or another CMS? See our headless migration approach.

Still on Strapi v4? See how we handle Strapi upgrades, or book a free call.