VPD is an Australian Magento-based online store offering a wide range of top-quality professional pet and animal products from respected brands delivered worldwide. Along with providing a really wide selection of pet care products from fish medications through cat and dog treats to reptile supplements, the company delivers professional advice to help customers opt for the right product best suited to their pets.
The main pain point the client came to us with revolved around both the frontend and backend load time. It would take more than 40 seconds for an uncached version of the website to load, which seems incredible and raises the question: how could they keep their biz afloat having such a serious malfunction?
Having performed a detailed website analysis and fault diagnosis, we could eventually identify key bottlenecks that slowed down the website’s optimal performance:
- First, it emerged that the store had a whopping 157 extensions installed. Holy smokes! VPD really seemed to be a new record holder! A boatload of extensions overwhelmed the store with way too much functionality, which added too much weight to the website and generated a plethora of system errors – the team discovered a whopping 23 gigs worth of log files! So our overriding priority was to get through this maze and make sure the website will keep running smoothly after we uninstall unwanted extensions and update the rest.
- What’s more, we found out that several extensions were trying to rewrite the same functionality thereby causing extension conflicts. For example, we were dismayed to discover three SEO extensions, to name a few, which explains why their core_url_rewrite table contained about 22 million records and why it was impossible to reindex from the admin panel.
With reference to the loopholes revealed we delivered well-targeted solutions that helped us garner the desired results in the long haul, namely:
- We cleaned the online store of unwanted extensions and unnecessary data that had been dragging the website loading times down. We had to pick extensions providing the most important functionality and remove the others. However, the majority of extensions were simply replaced with a better coded and more powerful option.
- We offered the client our unique solution, Magento CE to Virtual Enterprise Edition upgrade, and installed Virtual EE Package, which enabled them to get extra features exclusive to Magento premium paid version (improved reporting system providing amazing visibility, advanced customer segmentation and improved caching to name a few), without having to spend big bucks on the EE license.
- Along with the client we picked a new theme and replaced the old one that looked downright antiquated.
- We upgraded Magento version from the outdated 1.8 to the latest 1.9.3.3 and performed Magento Security Patches installation.
Due to meticulous troubleshooting and debugging, the avalanche of the website front-end and back-end upgrades and security updates that we implemented, the VPD website acquired both new look and overhauled functionality, which will help their business become more efficient as well as remain stable and highly competitive in the next 3-5 years.
Having upgraded the main platform, we were also privileged to conduct an upgrade of the client’s 5 other stores sharing one Magento installation, which added much more value to their biz.
