Squarespace simplifies and scales modernization to accelerate development

After adopting Moderne, Squarespace transformed its Tyson and Spring Boot upgrade process into a predictable, scalable workflow. The platform team translated Tyson’s historically manual, multi-step migration guides into composite, organization-wide recipes that automated the many transformations required for each upgrade. These recipes bundled together thousands of the Moderne Spring Boot recipes with Tyson-specific rules, along with Gradle and configuration updates that previously had to be applied service by service.

Moderne provided the environment needed to run these large, composite transformations across hundreds of repositories—centralizing the execution, testing, and validation work that had exceeded the limits of Squarespace’s internal tooling. Dev teams could execute the recipes when ready, review clean automated diffs, and merge with confidence. What had once required extensive coordination became a self-service, pull-based workflow that fit naturally into existing engineering rhythms.

As this approach proved effective, Squarespace expanded its use of automated recipes to support other modernization needs, including Java, Gradle, and JVM image improvements, reinforcing a more streamlined and scalable upgrade process across the engineering organization.

The impact of adopting Moderne was immediate and measurable. For major Tyson and Spring Boot upgrades, Moderne automated 50–60% of the required migration steps, and 60–70% for minor version bumps, cutting manual effort in half or more. Across the Tyson migration alone, Squarespace saved approximately 1,106 developer hours that would have otherwise been spent on repetitive upgrade work. For a platform team supporting more than 500 developers, this represented a meaningful return of engineering capacity back to product development.

The improvements extended beyond raw time savings. With deterministic, organization-wide recipes in place, Squarespace achieved a level of upgrade consistency and predictability that had previously been out of reach. The platform team now maintains the majority of services within Tyson’s three-version support window—a milestone they had never achieved before. What once took multiple years to complete is now tracking toward sub-year timelines, even for the company’s most complex, multi-version framework jumps.

Moderne’s DevCenter also provided the real-time visibility leadership had long been requesting, enabling them to monitor adoption across domains and eliminate the manual status gathering that once slowed progress.