Challenge
An established e-commerce business was running on a monolithic PHP application that couldn’t handle seasonal traffic. Page load times averaged 6 seconds, checkout abandonment was above industry benchmarks, and the development team was shipping features once a month due to tightly coupled code and manual deployment processes.
Approach
We rebuilt the platform from the ground up with a headless commerce architecture designed for performance and independent scalability:
- Frontend - Server-rendered React application with Next.js, optimized for Core Web Vitals with image lazy loading, code splitting, and edge caching via CloudFront
- Backend services - Decomposed the monolith into independent microservices for product catalog, cart, checkout, inventory, and order management, each with its own PostgreSQL database
- API layer - GraphQL gateway aggregating microservices, with query caching and rate limiting
- Infrastructure - Containerized with Docker, orchestrated on Amazon ECS with auto-scaling policies tied to request volume and CPU utilization
- CI/CD - Automated pipelines with GitHub Actions, including integration tests, performance benchmarks, and blue-green deployments
- Search - Elasticsearch integration for faceted product search with sub-100ms response times
Result
Page load times dropped from 6 seconds to under 2 seconds. The platform handled Black Friday traffic at 5x normal volume without degradation. Checkout abandonment decreased 22%, directly contributing to measurable revenue growth in the first quarter after launch. The development team now ships multiple times per week with confidence.