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.

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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.

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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.

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Results

1. Autonomy: The marketing team works independently, no more dev bottlenecks.
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2. Future-proof foundation: Clean Strapi v5 setup on Cloud, ready for new features.
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3. Performance: Lighthouse 98/100, <1s page loads.

4. Stability: Reliable deployments, improved testing processes.

5. Trusted partnership: Notum embedded as Meilisearch’s Strapi specialists.

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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

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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.

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Meilisearch trusts us with their site. Want the same team for your site?

Book a free call https://calendly.com/notum

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