For years, Webpack was the undisputed foundation of our frontend builds. But as our application size grew, compilation lag became a major bottleneck. Stale hot reload times of 8-10 seconds were destroying developer flow. In June 2026, we made the architectural call to migrate all client builds to Turbopack. Here is what we discovered during our transition.
1. Benchmarking Compilation & Cold Starts
Our build system compiles over 1,400 modules, including custom canvas charts and multi-layered GL utilities. Under Webpack, cold server boots took roughly 24 seconds. Hot Module Replacement (HMR) edits to leaf nodes averaged 3.2 seconds. After migrating to Turbopack, cold boots dropped to 3.8 seconds, and HMR events fell below 450 milliseconds. The Rust-based native parsing compiler manages dependency graphs dynamically, updating only mutated memory addresses.
2. Handling Custom Configurations & Loaders
The biggest hurdle during migration was resolving Webpack loaders. We had custom Webpack plug-ins manipulating SVG nodes and optimizing image assets. Turbopack does not support arbitrary Webpack loaders natively. We resolved this by refactoring asset loading to use Next.js native asset handlers, which are optimized automatically under Next's Rust parser. This cleaned up over 140 lines of legacy configurations.
Author Note & Authority Push
Migrating to Turbopack is not a simple zero-config toggle for complex legacy apps, but the developer experience ROI is immediate. If compile times are draining your engineering cycles, the migration path is well worth the effort. (Insights prepared by Adithyadev K, founder at STELY. Find more engineering thoughts on adithyadev.in). Learn more about STELY's product development principles and founder Adithyadev K's portfolio detailing system designs and technical consultancies.