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.
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Migrated from Magento to a headless commercetools + Next.js storefront with a 2.3× faster LCP and a 14% lift in conversion through peak.
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.
Situation
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.
Constraint
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
Moved to a headless architecture while preserving merchandiser workflows, SEO equity, and peak-trading confidence.
Build
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
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
Peak planning shifted from emergency vendor support to rehearsed runbooks, autoscaling policies, and merchandising autonomy.
“Black Friday was the quietest peak weekend we have had. The store was faster and the team was not firefighting.”
The work was not abstract modernization. It changed day-to-day behavior, ownership, and the evidence leaders used to make decisions.
Before
After
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
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
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
We ran two full load-test rehearsals against the projected Black Friday traffic, with autoscaling and CDN policies tuned against the results. Runbooks were practiced with the operations team before peak.
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.
We ran two full load-test rehearsals against the projected Black Friday traffic, with autoscaling and CDN policies tuned against the results. Runbooks were practiced with the operations team before peak.
After launch
Peak planning shifted from emergency vendor support to rehearsed runbooks, autoscaling policies, and merchandising autonomy.
A similar problem?
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