Stringjoy presented with a legacy WordPress site, and was using WooCommerce to provide the store’s e-commerce functionality. The primary complaint revolved around site speed and sluggish performance.

During peak season, the site frequently experienced timeouts, which were particularly impactful when they occurred mid-way through checkout.

After navigating the WordPress ecosystem for a decade, the client was ready for a change; they wanted peak performance and a more robust solution that would hold-up to their growth.

Over the lifespan of the existing WordPress site, the client had accumulated vast amounts of data—customers, orders, subscriptions, and more; totalling hundreds of thousands of individual records.

WordPress isn't known for its clean database architecture, and the variance in plugin use over time meant that data was fragmented and non-standardized throughout the database, depending on the plugin in use at the time. With the goal of a smooth transition, it was naturally a requirement to preserve as much historical data as possible.

Further to this, Stringjoy wanted to perform a lift and shift of the storefront's visual interface, in such a way that the new build would be visually indistinguishable from the original.

In the existing WordPress store, various plugins were in place to cater to subscriptions, multiple payment methods, discount codes, checkout customizations, and the like.

During our analysis, we found the store to be using a total of 73 individual plugins—a far cry from the conservative approach that is typically regarded as best practice.

The WordPress site was using Elementor as the primary page builder and base theme, which contributed significantly to frontend bloat. Page builders are rife within the WordPress ecosystem, and while they provide for ease of layout editing, they’re known to introduce significant amounts of bloat within the DOM tree, stylesheets, and JS dependencies.

As can be expected, the combination of 70+ active plugins, utilization of such a heavy page builder, and numerous unoptimized customizations had led to a break-down in the site’s performance.

The WordPress site was struggling to cope with the store's relatively high number of daily active users, coupled with high daily order volume. Substantial increases in traffic were occurring during the store’s peak season and promotional periods, putting further strain on the existing implementation. On occasion, users would experience timeouts during the cart & checkout flows, which would inevitably impact the customer experience.

In an effort to mitigate this, a number of caching plugins had been layered on top of each other in WordPress, further to server-side caching, and CDN implementation.

The client’s monthly hosting bill wasn’t cheap: but regrettably, there were larger issues at play beyond infrastructure.

Cocoon recommended replatforming from WordPress/WooCommerce to a Headless Shopify implementation. While the Shopify platform itself offers strong core web vitals out of the box, the desired storefront would be image heavy, rich in interactive functionality, and would continue to utilize a high number of third party scripts.

A headless approach was advised so that we could retain full control as to the loading of these assets and scripts, and to enable us with the ability to employ best-in-class techniques in unison with a static-generated frontend to guarantee that the desired level of performance was delivered. By using the Shopify SaaS platform in combination with a static headless storefront, Stringjoy wouldn’t have to worry about performance; and server timeouts during peak season would be a thing of the past.