Company Overview
EZ Living Furniture is a leading Irish furniture retailer who deals in a comprehensive range of stylish home furniture and furnishings. You can shop from their online platforms available in Ireland as well as the UK. Apart from these online stores, EZ Living Furniture also has many physical stores across Ireland allowing customers to view, experience and then make a purchase.
Key Challenges
Our client got this project developed with another agency in PWA Studio and Magento 2. However, there were many issues in their current platform. So they have approached our team to create a fresh design with the latest technology stack. Our team required to focus on the issues mentioned below in order to provide a seamless experience:
Performance
The website’s performance had a significant issue where the page load time was extremely long and affected user experience.
Architecture/infra Cost
Despite leveraging high-quality resources like AWS, the architecture of the website was not optimized properly which resulted in increased expenses.
Instability /Traffic Handling
The website was unstable even under normal traffic conditions suffering crashes even with adequate resources.
Web vitals /SEO
Website’s core web vitals and SEO performance was heavily compromised.
ERP sync issues
Order synchronization with ERP was unreliable and had random issues.
Payment/Order Missing
The website was experiencing issues related to syncing orders between payment gateways and magento.
Import job issues
Catalog/Stock Import jobs had stability issues
UI /UX Revamp
A comprehensive redesign was necessary with regards to UI/UX to meet industry standards.
Our Solution
Our team conducted a comprehensive audit that revealed multiple issues within the website architecture and codebase. By integrating a new Relic, we identified the SQL/query load, as well as the components that caused delays in loading. Then, we optimized the modules that were affected and cleaned up the redundant data, such as url_rewrite from the tables. As a result, this improved performance but it was not up to the mark and now we needed to go for infrastructure revamp.
The client approved our request for an infrastructure revamp. While our team was exploring the PWA components, we found many outdated modules and unnecessary customizations, so we decided to go for a completely new architecture and UI/UX design. Moreover, we also upgraded our entire tech stack for a better experience. We reviewed business requirements and optimized existing features, customizations, and integrations to align with best practices, eliminating redundant and suboptimal code.
Architecture/ Implementation
We designed the architecture with scalability, efficiency and running cost in mind over the AWS infrastructure.
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EC2 instances for each service/application(Magento/Backend, PWA/frontend, Redis, Varnish).- ELB (Elastic load balancer) for routing and ASG for Auto Scaling.
- S3 buckets for media.
- RDS for database
- Opensearch Service for search
- For Prerendering solution for boats we used separate service from prerender.io
- We used cloudflare for caching and WAF
- Cloudflare WAF implemented a website safe from boat attacks.
- Proper usage CORS module and their listing.
- IP based whitelisting for integrations.
- VPN/VPC restricted access.
- Penetration Testing.
- CSP implementation on frontend.
- Protect Against CSRF and XSS.
- Regularly Update and Patch.
- Restricted Admin Access.
- SSL Encryption.
- Manual/Automated code reviews are conducted alongside the use of SonarQube, and for frontend ESLint is employed for coding formatting and adherence to standards.
- Utilized the AWS CloudWatch service to set up alerts for system downtime and developed a Python script on Lambda to send notifications in case the GraphQL services are unresponsive.
- The Noibu tool, a third-party solution, is employed to capture frontend traces and user experiences. It sends notifications for every frontend error encountered by end users on various browsers and devices.
- GA4 with GTM
- We used github for branch and repository management.
- Source code scanning during the code commits/merge.
- DeployHq(third party) service to send the builds and manage the pre/post deployment command, it also flush the cache automatically from cloudflare on post deployment.
- Webp conversion using lambda script on S3 itself without application involvement, any image that goes to S3 automatically converts to webp.
- There is no single image/csv or any kind of media hosted or placed on webserver.
- Varnish and Redis configurations to use best of it.
- Database junk cleanup tasks are designed to remove logs or outdated and unwanted data within a specified timeframe.
- Added third party cloud service called prerender.io to render a preprocessed or cached html dom for google/bing and other social platforms for better seo and website performance.
- Orderite ERP – Custom module to sync Catalog, Orders with Orderite.
- Worldpay – Custom payment module for both backend and frontend.
- Givex Gift Card – Custom module created to interact with givex for gift card buying and redemption
- Prerender.io (Prerenderer) – Service to render a preprocessed/cached dom for boats.
Tech Stack
UI/UX Design
Created a new PWA theme which was adhering to several UI/UX standards and best practices to ensure a seamless and user friendly experience.
The Results
The solutions implemented by our team have delivered tremendous results significantly contributing to the website’s success in generating quality leads, maximizing revenue and earning recognition through prestigious awards.
Client Testimonial
Agnieszka E-commerce Project Manager
"It's been nearly 6 months now since we started to work together. After a hiccup at the start, I can honestly say that I am happy with our choice and decision of having VT as a partner. We are progressing fine with the tasks, the reported bugs are being quickly resolved, and everything that the team has delivered so far was up to the standard we expected.
I am very satisfied with the team's knowledge and glad that I do not need to spend hours explaining Magento basics as I did with our former partner. I would also like to thank you and the team for being always professional and very responsive."
Irish eCommerce Awards 2023
We are proud to announce that the EZ Living Furniture have been declared as a finalist for two categories in the Irish eCommerce Awards 2023.
2024 Large website business of the year
EZ Living Furniture were delighted to receive the runner up award for Large Business Website of the year at the PTSB National Digital Awards 2024.
2023 Nation Website of the Year
At the Digital Business Ireland's National Digital Awards is the Gibson Hotel, Dublin, we were crowned the winners of the National Website of the Year.
