Project Goal: Replatform an e-commerce shop from the current cloud hosting solution to an on-prem WordPress deployment. I would be taking control of every aspect – essentially assuming the role of a full stack developer.
Taking months of planning, testing, migrating, designing and tweaking, this was one of the most complex and lengthy projects I have undertaken thus far. Provisions had to be made for every detail of the operation as it was essential that disruption was kept to a minimum as this was still a live site.
As such careful consideration was taken to orchestrate a smooth migration, each step overlapping both platforms as much as possible so that when the new site was ready to go live, it was a simple matter of changing DNS records.
Given that I handled every aspect of the migration, from backend architecture and hosting to re-editing every product photo from scratch, project organisation was crucial. Email, DNS, delivery options, packing notes, rebranding, UX, UI, page speed index, photo size and quality – countless but important factors. I used a ticket system to open and close issues, divided up into UI/UX, content and functionality.
A major benefit of migrating to a self hosted deployment was performance. It allowed me to fine tune and tweak every aspect of the stack. TCP buffers, HTTP3 over QUIC, compression and load balancing could all be optimised for a fantastic Google page speed score:
Significant work also had to be done to determine the optimal photo resolution and size. We wanted crisp, high quality photos, but Google had to come first. I settled on the webp format, 2500x3000px – adjusting the quality per photo aiming for 500kb. This is still pretty large, but the site traffic volume is low and thus quality was put above bandwidth. The backend could handle it easily so why settle for less.
Email was also a little bit of a hurdle. Currently I’m hosting the email server myself, which handles sending and routing using Postal. After making sure that SPF, DKIM, DMARC, reverse DNS and BIMI were all set up correctly, the deliverability seems to be excellent – with ongoing monitoring to ensure that the emails aren’t going straight to spam.
I continue to tweak and maintain the website, which you can view here:
