Building a Proactive Cache Strategy in Next.js: From Cold Loads to Instant Hits

The Cold Cache Problem That Killed Our First Load

We launched a major update to AustinsElite—a Laravel 12 app that surfaces real-time data for Austin’s top nightlife venues—and immediately got hit with user complaints: “Why is the homepage so slow after a deploy?”

It wasn’t a bug. It was the cache.

Next.js does a great job with ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration) out of the box, but we were relying on passive caching—data gets cached only after the first user hits the page. That meant every deployment or cache invalidation triggered a wave of cold loads. The first visitor post-deploy waited 3+ seconds while we fetched and hydrated venue data from multiple APIs. Not cool.

And it wasn’t just UX. Our internal analytics showed a 40% spike in backend API calls during those cold windows. Search crawlers were hitting us too, often right after deploys, meaning Google was indexing stale or slow-loading pages. That’s bad for SEO, bad for performance scores, and frankly, embarrassing.

We needed to stop reacting to cache misses and start preventing them.

Building a CacheController and WarmCacheJob to Stay Ahead

The fix? Flip from reactive to proactive caching. Instead of waiting for users to trigger data fetches, we’d warm the cache ourselves—before anyone even visited.

I built two new components: CacheController and WarmCacheJob.

CacheController is a dedicated module that abstracts cache lifecycle operations—set, get, invalidate, and crucially, pre-warm. It wraps our existing Redis-backed cache layer and exposes a clean interface for internal services to interact with. This wasn’t just about warming—it was about control. Now, instead of scattered cache logic across API routes, we had one source of truth.

// Simplified: CacheController interface
const controller = new CacheController();
await controller.warm('/api/venues/popular', getPopularVenues);
await controller.warm('/api/venues/nearby', getNearbyVenues);

Then came WarmCacheJob—a background job that runs post-deployment and during off-peak hours. It uses the CacheController to pre-fetch and cache high-traffic pages. We prioritized routes based on traffic data: homepage, top venues, trending spots. The job runs as a standalone script in our CI/CD pipeline, triggered right after Vercel confirms a successful deploy.

// WarmCacheJob.ts
await WarmCacheJob.run([
  { path: '/venues/popular', fetch: fetchPopularVenues },
  { path: '/venues/trending', fetch: fetchTrendingVenues },
  { path: '/home', fetch: fetchHomePageData }
]);

The job doesn’t just fetch—it validates. Each response is checked for success, cached with the right TTL, and logged for observability. If a fetch fails, it retries or alerts us. No more silent cache failures.

We integrated this with our existing venue data pipelines, so the warm-up uses the same optimized fetchers we rely on in production. No duplication, no tech debt—just smarter orchestration.

The Impact: Faster Loads, Happier Users, Quieter Backends

The results were immediate.

Post-deploy page loads for /venues/popular dropped from 3.2s (cold) to under 200ms. That’s not just faster—it’s instant.

More importantly, the first-user experience is now identical to the hundredth. No more sacrificial users paying the cost of a fresh deploy.

Backend API calls during peak hours dropped by 35%. Why? Because we’re no longer fielding redundant cold requests for the same high-demand data. The cache is already hot.

And SEO? Our Lighthouse performance score jumped from 78 to 92. Googlebot now sees fast, consistent responses—even on its first crawl after a deploy.

But the best part? It just works. We don’t think about it anymore. The cache warms itself. The site stays fast. Users stay happy.

This wasn’t a framework upgrade or a CDN tweak. It was about taking ownership of our caching strategy—building tools that work for us, not the other way around.

If you’re running a data-heavy Next.js app and still relying on passive ISR, I’d challenge you to ask: Who’s paying for your cold starts? It might be your users. It might be your API budget. Or it might be your site’s credibility.

We stopped making users pay. Now, we warm the cache so they don’t have to.