MATRA - CAT

Snapshot

• Role — Frontend Developer: I built the whole site, from markup to deployment and the CMS integration.
• Scope — The company's public site: equipment for sale and rent, parts, promotions, branch locations and the maintenance, financing and technical advisory lines.
• Outcome — Lighthouse scores of 97 performance, 96 accessibility, 100 best practices and 100 SEO.

The problem

MATRA - CAT sells and rents heavy machinery, but their previous site was slow and looked a decade old. For someone landing on it to price an excavator or a rental plan, that site was the company's first impression — and it helped neither with finding the equipment nor with getting in touch.

Key decisions

• Rebuild the site in Next.js with ISR — the content changes rarely, but it has to change without waiting on a developer, so every page is served statically and regenerated on demand. The tradeoff: you have to reason about caching, and an edit isn't live until the page revalidates.
• Trigger revalidation with a webhook from the CMS — rather than letting fresh content wait for the ISR window to expire, WordPress pings the site whenever something is published. The tradeoff: the site is now coupled to the CMS, and the endpoint and its secret need maintaining — if the webhook fails, it fails silently until the next time-based revalidation.
• Keep WordPress as a headless CMS — the team already knew how to publish there, and switching tools would have meant retraining them on top of a launch. The tradeoff: the site inherits a content model that was never designed to be consumed over an API, and the frontend carries that shape.
• Use Motion for the animations — the site needed to feel like a considered product, not a showcase of effects. The tradeoff: more JavaScript on the client, which was the heaviest cost to weigh against the performance score.

Outcome

• Lighthouse in production: 97 performance, 96 accessibility, 100 best practices, 100 SEO.
• MATRA's team publishes and edits in WordPress and the change reaches the site with no redeploy — the webhook revalidates the affected page.

What I'd do differently

• I'd swap WordPress for Strapi. WordPress won on continuity for the editors, but modeling the machinery catalog in an API-first CMS would have saved reshaping the content in the frontend.

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