Case study · Retail & E-commerce
Replatforming a 40,000-SKU retailer without a traffic dip
A decade-old monolith was taking eleven seconds to render a category page. We moved to headless commerce and migrated traffic route by route.
- Client
- Multi-brand retail group
- Industry
- Retail & E-commerce
- Region
- APAC
- Duration
- 7 months
- Team
- 6 engineers
- Delivered
- 2025
The problem
Category pages took over eleven seconds on mobile, and organic traffic had been declining for six consecutive quarters.
The storefront and the order management system were the same application, so any frontend change risked fulfilment.
A big-bang cutover was unacceptable — the site carried the majority of the group’s revenue.
What we did
- 1
We introduced a headless storefront in front of the existing commerce backend and migrated one route group at a time behind a proxy.
- 2
Product and category pages became statically generated with incremental revalidation, so catalogue updates propagate without a rebuild.
- 3
Search moved to a dedicated index with faceting, replacing the SQL `LIKE` queries that had been driving database load.
- 4
We ran both stacks in parallel for eight weeks with traffic split by route, so any regression was a routing change away from rollback.
“The route-by-route migration is what sold us. We were never more than one config change away from rolling back.”
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