TitanFittings: How to Optimize eCommerce Site Speed for Peak Performance and Lightning-Fast Loading Times
Industries: Manufacturing, Industrial equipment
Migration from Volusion to CS-Cart + Lightning
Super-fast page loading - Green zone in Google Page Speed Insight
Instant store search - less than 3 ms
Lightning Commerce solution to make stable and secure online store.
Look Google PageSpeed ofTitanFittings website
Home page
Category page
Product page
About online store
In 2023, our loyal client trusted us one more of his projects.
The e-commerce site TitanFittings sells hydraulic products under their own brand, Titan, all over the USA.
This online store has:
2,000 categories
20,000 products
The Titanfittings online shop was created on Volusion CMS in 2014.
The main problems the client faced were:
Inconvenient Volusion CMS;
Serious problems with Volusion customization due to business demands;
Slow search and filter functionality on storefront;
The website sometimes crashes during import and export processes.
Old website design that should be updated.
We worked as a dedicated team of developers.
The web developers spent many hours on this project.
Moreover, our SEO specialists and content managers also were involved in this project.
Dedicated developer service - client hired several Alt-team specialists (team lead, backend and frontend programmers, SEO specialist, content manager). We worked within 1 year as a dedicated team.
As a result, we got a real modular e-commerce system. The final online store has integrations with these services.
Meilisearch - an open-source, blazingly fast, and hyper-relevant search engine that will improve your search experience.
ShipStation - a web-based shipping solution that streamlines the order fulfillment process for your online business. ShipStation consolidates orders from over 70 ecommerce channels
Working team
Facts about this fast e-commerce site
Goals:Why the client decided to migrate from Volusion CMS?
This client has 4 e-commerce websites connected to his main business area, selling stainless steel fittings and hydraulic hoses offline and online. He has 4 different admin panels for all these websites.
CS-Cart CMS has the ability to manage several storefronts from one admin panel. That's why the client decided to use CS-Cart for all his projects in the future.
Volusion CMS can't be easily customized, as the client requires. But the CS-Cart solution is a flexible platform that has many ready-to-use add-ons, and any developer can easily customize this CMS. Moreover, it's a feature-rich system for e-commerce.
The target of the client was to get a more modern and good-looking online store that would have the necessary features modern days e-commerce: user-friendly interface, adaptive web design, integration with the client’s payment providers, and delivery services.
One of the main problems for the client was the slow loading of website pages on mobile. We have already informed the client about our new product, Lightning Commerce. Our product increases the website's performance to incredible digits, makes the online store stable during the sale period, or rapidly increases website traffic and improves the website's security.
The dream of every website owner is to make their website extremely popular and get benefits from it: more orders, more clients. The client expected an increase in website traffic after migrating from Volusion CMS to CS-Cart + Lightning Commerce.
Challenges:What we had to face during web development
We can't say that this project was very challenging for our team. We have vast experience in web development, and it's a rare case when we come across challenges in our projects.
During our long-term work on this project, our team faced different small issues that we want to indicate as little challenges for us.
The CMS migration process is always a task with hidden pitfalls. This time, we faced the challenge of moving customer data from Volusion to CS-Cart. As any system Volusion CMS doesn't give access to password hashes. Of course, we thought about this issue, and all users received emails with information that due to the moving of our site, the user needs to update his password.
The slow search feature was one of the main problems for the client. We had a challenge improving the search speed to less than 3 ms.
Static websites are fast and our target was to reach the maximum website performance taking into consideration a big amount of product pages in the store.
Progress: How fast is the ecommerce site?
Results: Fast online shop with CS-Cart admin panel
Lightning Commerce project
We launched this live Lightning Commerce project, which is very fast, super secure, and scalable.
The old website was extremely slow in page loading. The mobile version was always in a red zone on Google Page Speed. The new website is fast and in the green zone on desktops and mobiles.
Alt-team developers cope to move from Volusion to CS-Cart all data like:
customers;
orders.
The client moved products and product categories by themselves using the CS-Cart import/export feature as the client decided to rearrange all product categories on their new online store.
All URLs on the old website (Volusion) had.html at the end.
The client decided to create a new structure for the product categories and all website URLs.
Our task was to set up 301 redirects correctly. A large number of redirects were set up on the Vercel server to reduce page loading time.
Some 301 redirects were set up with the default CS-Cart feature in the admin panel by many reasons.
Easy page loading and a great user experience are essential for large-scale online shops. This e-commerce website has constantly increased website traffic.
We used ISR (incremental static regeneration) for pages with content and CSR (client-side rendering) for checkout and orders. These methods allow us to update content without the need to redeploy the page, which translates to better performance and security, as well as a shorter building time.
This online store has an instant store search. You can hardly find other stores with such fast search or sort/filter features on the fly.
Site search is one of the weak points of any online store. Slow search, sorting, or filtering of product features are usually reasons for a high bounce rate in the store.
We use integration with Meilisearch service to increase search speed on this e-commerce website.
We use our lightning commerce solution to improve product sorting and product filtering features on the shop.
There was a third-party add-on for CS-Cart system that client had bought on marketplace, but the add-on wasn't ideal for the client and our task was to rewrite all the add-on's code to make it compatible with CS-Cart.
AWS High-Availability Architecture
Step 1
When we made the NextJS frontend and separated it from the CS-Cart CMS, it improved page loading speed on the storefront a lot. CS-Cart back-end worked stable, and we can stop speed optimization on this website, but we decided to make a fault-tolerant system to prevent the website from down with a large number of orders simultaneously during high seasons.
Step 2.
We set up Amazon hosting that scales automatically for the CS-Cart backend to ensure the website's high availability during high backend loads.
If the CS-Cart load exceeds 10%, an extra server is instantly added to handle the requests. This AWS high-availability architecture makes the system fault-tolerant and ensures that it never breaks due to heavy traffic or a large number of orders.
Our team about this project
I was a SEO consultant during the development process. I saw their old website on Volusion CMS and made a basic SEO audit where I listed all e-commerce stores. When the developers designed a new website on CS-Cart, they took into consideration all SEO demands for e-commerce websites.
It's one of my best cases. I do my best to complete it as an ideal variant of the fast and powerful e-commerce website with the rapid search feature. The filters work as quickly as lightning. The stability of the online store is magic. I can't even imagine the scenario when this website crashes.
I can't say that I was involved in this project's development on a regular basis, but I contributed a lot to the development process. I discussed with the client the spheres where only I was a specialist, and I helped to organize the work between a full-stack developer, a front-end developer, and SEO consultant. The project was challenging for me as there were many non-trivial tasks.
Client about Alt-team
Thanks a lot for the effort. Guys, thank you so much! It’s been a long journey but I like how it looks
Do you need a blazinng-fast ecommerce site?
Our email is manager@alt-team.com
Please, do not hesitate to contact us via e-mail or use the form below if you need a quote for your E-commerce project or have any questions about our products or services. We will be glad to answer you in a short time.