TrialExhibits Inc.

Transforming TrialExhibits with a High-Performance Laravel CMS

TrialExhibits is a specialized medical-legal services company that creates and manages complex medical exhibits used in litigation, education, and courtroom presentations. Their platform needed to support rich media assets, structured content, fast access for legal professionals, and strong search visibility—all while remaining easy to manage internally.

When TrialExhibits approached me, they were operating on a traditional WordPress-based CMS that had grown increasingly difficult to scale and maintain. Performance issues, content management limitations, and infrastructure constraints were beginning to impact both user experience and operational efficiency.

The goal of this project was clear: replace WordPress with a purpose-built, high-performance, secure, and scalable custom CMS tailored specifically to their business needs.

The Challenge: Outgrowing WordPress

WordPress is an excellent platform for many use cases, but for TrialExhibits, it had become a bottleneck rather than an enabler.

Some of the core challenges included:

• Severely slow page load times, especially on content-heavy medical exhibit pages
• Increasing reliance on plugins, leading to performance degradation and security risks
• Limited flexibility in modeling complex exhibit data
• Difficulty scaling infrastructure to handle large media files efficiently
• SEO limitations caused by bloated page rendering and poor Core Web Vitals

For a company whose credibility depends on clarity, speed, and professionalism, these issues were no longer acceptable.

After a detailed technical and business assessment, it became clear that a custom Laravel-based CMS was the right long-term solution—one that would prioritize performance, scalability, and maintainability from day one.

The Solution: A Custom Laravel CMS Built for Performance

Instead of retrofitting WordPress, I designed and built a fully custom CMS using the TALL stack (Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, Laravel, and Livewire). This allowed us to create a modern application that was both developer-friendly and intuitive for non-technical content editors.

Key architectural decisions included:

• Laravel as the core framework for reliability, structure, and long-term maintainability
• A clean, modular CMS architecture tailored specifically to TrialExhibits’ content workflows
• Optimized database schemas designed for structured medical exhibit data
• A lightweight frontend focused on speed and accessibility

The result is a CMS that feels fast, responsive, and purpose-built—not a generic template stretched beyond its limits.

Cloud Infrastructure: Built Entirely on AWS

To ensure scalability, reliability, and global performance, the entire application was deployed on Amazon Web Services, using best-practice cloud architecture.

The infrastructure includes:

• Amazon S3 for storing all medical exhibits, documents, and media assets
• Amazon CloudFront to globally distribute exhibit content with low latency
• Amazon EC2 instances to host and scale the Laravel application
• Amazon RDS with MySQL for a secure, managed, and performant database layer

This setup ensures:

• High availability
• Easy horizontal scaling
• Secure asset delivery
• Consistent performance across geographies

By separating compute, storage, and delivery layers, the system remains flexible and future-proof.

Performance Gains: From Sluggish to Sub-Second Loads

One of the most dramatic improvements came in page load performance.

Before the migration:

• Pages frequently took multiple seconds to load
• Media-heavy exhibit pages were especially slow
• SEO rankings were negatively affected by poor performance metrics

After the Laravel migration:

• All pages load in under 0.5 seconds
• Static and media assets are delivered via CloudFront CDN
• Server response times were reduced significantly
• Google Core Web Vitals scores improved across the board

This performance boost directly impacts:

• User experience
• Search engine rankings
• Client confidence in the platform

Speed was not treated as an afterthought—it was a primary design goal.

SEO-First Architecture

The new CMS was built with SEO baked into the foundation, not layered on via plugins.

Key SEO enhancements include:

• Server-side rendering for clean, crawlable HTML
• Optimized meta tags, structured headings, and semantic markup
• Fast Time-to-First-Byte (TTFB) for better search rankings
• Clean URLs and predictable content structures
• Reduced JavaScript overhead compared to WordPress

This ensures that TrialExhibits’ content is not only fast, but also search-engine friendly and future-proof.

CMS Features Tailored to TrialExhibits

The custom CMS empowers the TrialExhibits team with:

• Easy creation and management of medical exhibits
• Structured content editing without technical complexity
• Secure media uploads and controlled access
• Admin tools designed around their real workflows—not generic blog tooling
• A clean UI that minimizes training and onboarding time

Because the system was custom-built, every feature exists for a reason—no unnecessary clutter, no unused plugins, no technical debt waiting to surface.

Security, Stability, and Maintainability

Security and long-term stability were critical considerations, especially given the sensitive nature of medical-legal content.

The Laravel-based system offers:

• Strong authentication and authorization layers
• Reduced attack surface compared to plugin-heavy WordPress setups
• Controlled update cycles without breaking dependencies
• Cleaner codebase that is easier to audit and extend

This gives TrialExhibits confidence that their platform will remain reliable for years to come.

The Outcome

By migrating from WordPress to a custom Laravel CMS, TrialExhibits gained:

• Sub-second page load times
• Improved SEO and discoverability
• A CMS designed specifically for medical exhibits
• Scalable, cloud-native AWS infrastructure
• Improved security and maintainability

Most importantly, they now have a platform that supports their business instead of limiting it.

Final Thoughts

This project is a great example of when custom software is not an over-engineering exercise—but a strategic investment. By deeply understanding TrialExhibits’ requirements and building a solution tailored to their needs, we delivered measurable improvements in performance, usability, and scalability.

At Work Done Right, this is the standard: assess first, build intentionally, and deliver systems that perform—today and in the long run.