Magento optimization for the leading greenhouse retailer in Germany
Staylime performs Magento optimization for Gewächshausplaza, introducing performance improvements, and ensuring its uninterrupted operation by rendering ongoing support services.
Our customer, Gewächshausplaza, is a large German retailer offering a wide assortment of high-quality
greenhouses,
ranging from miniature balcony pieces to huge aluminium installations for professional gardeners.
Working with the leading European manufacturers and premium brands, the company also produces custom greenhouse solutions and related equipment.
It stands to reason that a powerful, beautifully designed website is a prerequisite of making it big for any ecommerce business regardless of the products or services they provide. With that in mind, our customer had contracted a freelance developer, hoping to get a full-featured ecommerce solution to establish robust online presence, yet save time and costs on engaging a professional team.
Unfortunately, their expectations were never met: the delivered Magento store was full of bugs, hampering customer
experience and inevitably impacting company’s sales. After 3 years of desperate attempts to make the website work
properly, Gewächshausplaza had finally decided to hand the project over to a full-service Magento development company for optimization.
Seeking a reliable vendor to fix all the issues and enhance the website both technically and
commercially, Gewächshausplaza turned to Staylime.
Thanks to our proven track record, the customer entrusted our team with project rescue.
Related serviceNeed to support your store too? Learn more about our maintenance & support offer
Staylime renders a full range of Magento maintenance and support services to businesses that want to enhance the functionality, security, and performance of their Magento stores.
The major goal of the project was to perform Magento optimization, improving website performance and driving higher conversion rates by addressing
a number of visual and technical tasks and issues.
In particular, we had to:
Rearrange website’s layout in a way to provide viewers with more content, yet ensure fast and easy
navigation;
Update the design to ensure equal browsing experience across various devices;
Install the latest security patches;
Refactor the code of the existing store;
Fix the bugs and defects caused by the avoidance of common Magento standards and best practices to ensure
faster
page loading and overall site performance;
Ensure stable operation of the existing store and prepare it for migration to Magento 2;
Besides, Gewächshausplaza were planning to migrate their store to Magento 2 as soon as it’s stable and bug-free, so it was necessary to set the stage for the migration as well.
Magento optimization
Given the scope of work, we proposed ongoing support with 40-hour prepaid blocks as the most optimal way
of collaboration.
The navigation menu and information architecture were the very first targets for us to hit. To make the website
easy-to-navigate, we revamped its layout by modifying the product and category pages. Responsive web design is no
longer a nice-to-have, but a must, so we adapted the user interface to fit bigger screens and ensure consistent and
seamless browsing experience to viewers.
Having polished up the visual aspect of the site, we proceeded enhancing its performance.
As migration was on the customer’s agenda too, we had to take care of the necessary preparatory
work during the second phase of the project.
In particular, the existing version of the Advanced Product Options module required a major upgrade, both on the
back- and frontend.
Initially, the extension was installed and then hard-coded by the previous developer, which hindered further work on
it. Besides, Gewächshausplaza tasked us with the refinement of the extension’s UI, but there was no documentation
or even Git commits for our team to review.
With complete absence of any initial information as well as customer’s unexpected intervention into the
development process, the conventional extension upgrade became quite a challenge.
First thing we did was to put the project under Git to ensure its traceability.
Working in the staging environment, we had to compare all the files manually to migrate legacy options to the
updated Advanced Product Options with no data damage or loss.
Each increment was then approved by the customer and uploaded to the production environment.
After that we stepped up to frontend development.
Since the product page has been significantly altered by our team before, we had to make some changes to the layout
of the custom options block and, correspondingly, to the frontend part of the Advanced Product Options
extension.
It would’ve been just a simple custom Magento development task had the customer allowed us to carry it out on our own. However,
there was more in this than meets the eye.
As we were working on Magento optimization, the client started to set up extension templates and assign them
to products on the staging environment.
They then asked us to transfer all the products with templates to the live environment. However, the templates should
have been set up live in the first place, as the staging contained test products and data.
Our project manager put a lot of effort to communicate the idea to Gewächshausplaza, having explained the proper approach in detail via call sessions and emails. All in all, merging the databases of two standalone Magento installations took longer than we expected, but our team managed to complete the task accurately.
Results
This project was a top priority initiative for Gewächshausplaza, and we helped the company in carrying it out.
We managed to perform Magento optimization and enhanced the company’s ecommerce website, having successfully handled all the technical issues
arising in the process.
As a result of the refinements made, the website metrics such as page visits and average time on page
have remarkably increased, contributing to a 10% turnover growth in less than 3 months.
The redesign has driven measurable improvements to the site’s visits and time spent per page, along with an improvement in the turnover rate.
Staylime adapted to in-house tools and utilized them to catch errors more efficiently. They’re a resourceful and reliable partner.
Peter MaasOwner, Gewächshausplaza
Ultimately, we helped the customer to:
Ensure uninterrupted operation of their Magento 1 store
Reduce costs and save reputation by eliminating business-critical errors
Spare a lot of time that used to be devoted to solving problems and responding to complaints
Get ready for the 2019 sales season being absolutely sure that by 2020 the store will be ready for migration to Magento 2
For now, Staylime is looking forward to jumping at the opportunity of collaborating on migration of Gewächshausplaza’s store to Magento 2.
Related insight
Getting ready for migration too & want to know what to expect?
Read our guide to
learn what a proper migration from Magento 1 to Magento 2 entails. And
remember — time is short, so you should plan the migration now to ensure seamless,
uninterrupted operation of your business.
