4.1 seconds
to under one.

The site was slow in the specific way that costs money: fine on a desk, unusable on a phone on a train. Years of plugins had each solved a real problem and collectively made the storefront impossible to render quickly.

The usual advice — compress the images, add a caching layer — had already been taken, twice.

We went headless and moved rendering to the edge, which meant rebuilding the storefront rather than optimising it. Product data stayed where the client’s team already managed it, so nobody had to learn a new admin.

Checkout, tax and fulfilment were treated as the real project. That is where commerce builds actually get expensive, and where a fast homepage in front of a broken checkout would have proved nothing.

Largest Contentful Paint on mobile went from 4.1 seconds to under one. The client’s team edits the same fields they always did.

We run the infrastructure, including the release process, so a busy season is a capacity decision rather than a crisis.