Situation
The operating reality
The Magento storefront had become unmaintainable. PDP load times of 4–6 seconds were costing measurable conversion, and every Black Friday required a vendor-led performance war room.
Case study · E-Commerce
A headless commerce replatform that survived Black Friday and converted better
Migrated from Magento to a headless commercetools + Next.js storefront with a 2.3× faster LCP and a 14% lift in conversion through peak.
Anonymized delivery dashboard
E-Commerce outcome cockpit
LCP
2.3× faster
Conversion lift
+14%
Peak uptime
100%
Before
Constraint
Build
Controlled cutover
After
Measured gain
- Client
- D2C fashion retailer
- Industry
- E-Commerce
- Service
- E-Commerce Development
- Engagement closed
- September 2024
Storyline
From constraint to measurable change.
Every engagement is framed around the business situation, the constraint that made it hard, and the decision that turned delivery into a controlled path to value.
Constraint
Why it was hard
The replatform had to be invisible to merchandisers, preserve every SEO ranking, and ship in time to run the next peak season on the new stack.
Decision
The path we chose
Moved to a headless architecture while preserving merchandiser workflows, SEO equity, and peak-trading confidence.
Build
Headless on commercetools
We chose commercetools for the commerce engine and Next.js for the storefront, with Contentful for editorial and Algolia for search. Merchandisers kept a single CMS-like experience even as the runtime moved.
A URL-by-URL mapping table was built and reviewed with the SEO team. 301s were tested in staging against synthetic crawls; structured data parity was audited before launch and again 30 days after.
Outcome
Measured impact
LCP improved from a median of 4.1s to 1.8s on product detail pages.
Conversion rate increased 14% across the peak season vs. like-for-like the prior year.
What changed after launch
New behavior
Peak planning shifted from emergency vendor support to rehearsed runbooks, autoscaling policies, and merchandising autonomy.
Outcome
The numbers that mattered.
- LCP
- 0.0× faster
- Conversion lift
- +0%
- Peak uptime
- 0%
“Black Friday was the quietest peak weekend we have had. The store was faster and the team was not firefighting.”
Before and after
The transformation the client could see.
The work was not abstract modernization. It changed day-to-day behavior, ownership, and the evidence leaders used to make decisions.
Headless replatform
Before
- 4–6 second PDP loads
- Vendor-led Black Friday war room
- SEO risk on every change
After
- 1.8s median PDP LCP
- 100% peak uptime
- Merchandisers kept a single publishing flow
Architecture and delivery
A controlled path from discovery to launch.
The delivery plan made the system boundary explicit, then used rehearsals, gates, and telemetry to optimize safely before launch.
Delivery architecture
E-Commerce control loop
Discover
Headless on commercetools
We chose commercetools for the commerce engine and Next.js for the storefront, with Contentful for editorial and Algolia for search. Merchandisers kept a single CMS-like experience even as the runtime moved.
Build
SEO migration as a release gate
A URL-by-URL mapping table was built and reviewed with the SEO team. 301s were tested in staging against synthetic crawls; structured data parity was audited before launch and again 30 days after.
Launch
Peak rehearsals
We ran two full load-test rehearsals against the projected Black Friday traffic, with autoscaling and CDN policies tuned against the results. Runbooks were practised with the operations team before peak.
Build
How we shaped the work.
Headless on commercetools
We chose commercetools for the commerce engine and Next.js for the storefront, with Contentful for editorial and Algolia for search. Merchandisers kept a single CMS-like experience even as the runtime moved.
SEO migration as a release gate
A URL-by-URL mapping table was built and reviewed with the SEO team. 301s were tested in staging against synthetic crawls; structured data parity was audited before launch and again 30 days after.
Peak rehearsals
We ran two full load-test rehearsals against the projected Black Friday traffic, with autoscaling and CDN policies tuned against the results. Runbooks were practised with the operations team before peak.
What changed after launch
What shipped, and what it changed.
- LCP improved from a median of 4.1s to 1.8s on product detail pages.
- Conversion rate increased 14% across the peak season vs. like-for-like the prior year.
- 100% uptime through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with no manual scaling intervention.
- Organic traffic remained flat through cutover and exceeded prior-year levels within 21 days.
After launch
Peak planning shifted from emergency vendor support to rehearsed runbooks, autoscaling policies, and merchandising autonomy.
Stack
What we built it with.
Next.js
commercetools
Contentful
Algolia
TypeScript
AWS
Cloudflare
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