Rebuilding a retail storefront without losing a season
Migrating a decade-old storefront to a modern stack, incrementally, through the busiest trading quarter of the year.
The challenge
Northbay’s storefront had accumulated ten years of patches. Page loads on mobile were past six seconds, the checkout dropped roughly one in five sessions, and no one on the team was willing to touch the payment code. A full rewrite was the obvious answer and also the wrong one — the migration window everyone proposed ran straight through their peak trading quarter.
Our approach
Migrate by route, not by big bang
We put a routing layer in front of the old application and moved one template at a time — category pages first, then product, then checkout last. Each move was independently reversible. At no point was there a single date on which everything had to work.
Fix the measurable things first
Images were the entire performance story: uncompressed, full-size, and eagerly loaded. Correcting that alone took mobile load times below two seconds before a single page was rewritten, which bought credibility for the larger work.
Leave the team able to maintain it
We paired with two of their engineers throughout rather than handing over a finished system. By launch they had written a meaningful share of the checkout themselves and did not need us on retainer.
The outcome
The storefront moved fully across in eleven weeks with no trading downtime. Conversion improved most on mobile, where the performance gains were largest.
“They talked us out of the rewrite we asked for and into something less exciting that actually worked. That is worth more than it sounds.”
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