+31%
conversion rate
2.4s→0.9s
median page load
0
downtime through holiday peak
+22%
average order value
The Client
A family-owned specialty grocery retailer with a loyal national customer base for imported and artisanal foods. Online sales had grown to represent the majority of revenue, with pronounced seasonality: the six weeks around the winter holidays accounted for a large share of annual orders — gift boxes, perishables with delivery-date selection, and complex shipping rules.
The Challenge
The store ran on a heavily customized PHP platform that had accumulated a decade of plugins and patches. Median page loads sat around 2.4 seconds and got worse under load; the previous holiday season had brought two outages during promotional emails, each costing a day of peak revenue. Checkout was a five-step form with a high abandonment rate, and the perishables logic — delivery-date selection, weather holds, regional carrier rules — lived in fragile plugin code no one wanted to touch.
A full platform migration was too risky to complete before the next peak. The client needed a path that modernized the stack incrementally while protecting the season that funded the whole year.
What We Did
Dillo ran the replatform as an outsourced delivery project, then kept an augmented pod of two engineers embedded with the client's team after launch for ongoing storefront work.
- Built a headless storefront on Next.js — statically generated category and product pages with incremental revalidation, served from a CDN edge, so catalog browsing stays fast regardless of back-end load.
- Modernized the PHP back end on Laravel: carved the order, catalog and shipping logic out of legacy plugin code into tested, documented API services consumed by the storefront.
- Redesigned checkout from five steps to a single accordion flow with address autocomplete, saved payment methods, and a rebuilt delivery-date picker for perishables.
- Did deep performance work: image optimization, Redis caching for cart and session, query tuning on the hottest paths, and load testing against 5x the previous peak traffic.
- Cut over route by route behind a reverse proxy — catalog first, then cart, then checkout — so there was never a big-bang migration moment.
- Ran a war-room rotation through the holiday peak with dashboards, alerts and a rehearsed rollback plan that was never needed.
The Results
- Conversion rate rose 31% comparing the post-launch quarter to the same quarter a year earlier.
- Median page load dropped from 2.4s to 0.9s, with the largest gains on mobile — where most of the client's traffic lands.
- The site ran with zero downtime through the holiday peak, including the largest promotional email send in the company's history.
- Average order value grew 22%, helped by faster browsing and cross-sell modules on the new product pages.
- Checkout abandonment fell meaningfully after the single-flow redesign, and the ops team can now adjust shipping rules through configuration instead of code changes.
Figures reflect outcomes reported for this engagement; they are project results, not audited benchmarks.
Tech Stack
Services Used
Software Outsourcing for the replatform, plus IT Staff Augmentation for the embedded storefront pod after launch.