Retail · 2025

Moving an online shop that fell over every sale onto a platform that doesn't

A growing homeware brand lost its biggest trading day of the year to a crashed checkout. We moved it onto infrastructure built for peaks, weeks before the next one.

All work
Client
An independent homeware retailer
Duration
10 weeks
Services
Cloud & Infrastructure, Software Engineering
11×
Traffic peak handled with no downtime
5s → 0.9s
Mobile page load
−30%
Monthly hosting cost

The challenge

The retailer's shop ran on a single overloaded server that a previous agency had customised until nobody could safely update it. Pages took four to six seconds to load on a phone, and during the previous year's Black Friday the checkout failed for most of the afternoon — on the one day that usually made a tenth of the year's online revenue. The founders had a sale booked for ten weeks' time and no confidence the site would survive it.

What we did

  1. 01

    Load-tested the existing site on day three to find out exactly where it broke. It wasn't the server size — a stock lookup ran on every page view and locked the database under load.

  2. 02

    Moved the storefront onto a headless setup with the catalogue served from the edge, so browsing traffic never touches the database at all.

  3. 03

    Kept the retailer's existing order and stock systems, putting a queue in front of checkout so a surge slows orders slightly rather than dropping them.

  4. 04

    Rehearsed the sale twice with synthetic traffic at fifteen times normal volume, fixing what broke each time, before a single real customer saw the new site.

  5. 05

    Handed over runbooks and a dashboard the founders can read themselves, so the next peak doesn't depend on calling us.

The outcome

The sale ran at eleven times normal traffic with no downtime and no failed payments. Mobile pages now load in under a second. With hosting that scales to demand rather than a server sized for the worst day, the monthly infrastructure bill came down even as traffic grew. The founders ran the following peak without us.

Built with

  • Astro
  • Shopify Storefront API
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • Queues
  • k6
  • Grafana
“Last year we spent Black Friday apologising on Instagram. This year we spent it packing boxes.”
Co-founder, homeware retail client

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