The client was experiencing a decline in organic traffic to the site. In addition, the site occasionally went down. All of this caused poor performance and low conversions. As a result, online sales were not as good as the client expected. They knew that they needed to audit the site performance, as well as the scope of work they outsourced to freelance developers, and solve the problems to achieve their business goals.

Transform Agency started with a performance audit to detect all the factors that could cause performance issues.

After we provided the results of the audit to the client, they decided to completely abandon the services of the outsourced development team and handed over all tasks to Transform Agency.

The first and most important step we took after the audit was eliminating all code errors:

• calling the object manager directly on template files
• creating block object in template files
• using ObjectManager in module logic
• using too much logic in PHTML templates
• using plugins with around() instead of before() and after()
• using cacheable=“false” in layout handles
• using MYSQL search

During site testing, Transform Agency specialists also revealed that the permanent server resources were not enough to handle the growing site traffic in the evening. One of the solutions was to enable auto-scaling, which was provided by the hosting company, but for some reason had been ignored by the outsource development team. So, as the next step, Transform Agency helped fine-tune the hosting service to the best possible performance for Titan Rig.

In addition to the project scope, Transform Agency designed and implemented a custom solution that allowed Titan Rig’s clients to personalize the products they purchase: choose from no less than 40 colors and freely combine them for any cable.

Titan Rig was satisfied with the results, terminated their relationship with the freelance developers to whom they used to outsource the work, and trusted Transform Agency with their website.

Based on the Titan Rig’s feedback, now the site performs as they expected: the page load speed increased from 15 - 25 seconds to 2 - 4, Algolia search helped “heavy” categories load within 2 - 3 seconds instead of 16, search results became much more relevant, and the product customization made them stand out among competitors.