Client's Traffic Surges Amid COVID-19 Response
Background
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in significant business changes across the United States. With unemployment rates soaring, restaurants and businesses closing their doors to adhere to new social distancing rules, and healthcare workers tirelessly combating the novel coronavirus, communities rallied to support one another. Some individuals supported local restaurants by ordering meals to-go, others purchased gift cards for post-quarantine use, and our client, a prominent manufacturer, redirected 75 percent of their production to create face masks for frontline healthcare workers.
Problem
This strategic business decision sparked a viral outpouring of support both online and in the press, including a notable feature in a press conference with the President of the United States. This led to a swift increase in website traffic and sales for our client. Unfortunately, their existing website infrastructure, based on the open-source version of Magento, was unable to handle the surge in demand, resulting in site crashes and lost sales opportunities.
Solution
Creatuity set out to find a solution. Four of our developers worked to optimize the site’s code and server, and switch to a split database, which is only available on the Magento Commerce edition. The split database feature allows the store database to be cut into three independent databases: the CMS, sales operations, and checkout. The solution is advantageous because each of the independent databases can exist on a different server.
Migrating from the open source edition to Magento Commerce can be a lengthy process, taking approximately a few months on average. The Creatuity team managed to complete this project, successfully, in just 62 hours. Migrating to the Commerce version took 10 hours, preparing split scripts took 42 hours (including deployment and updating staging environment), and quality assurance took another 10 hours.
Overall, this is a great example of the value of Adobe Commerce, the scalability benefits of Adobe Commerce, and shows how Magento and Creatuity were able to meet the rapidly changing needs of a client due to COVID-19, and help them not just survive but thrive when demand suddenly shot up as everyone began shopping at home instead of in the stores
Joshua Warren, Creatuity CEO
Results
Despite this project being fairly new, positive results were seen immediately upon launching Adobe Commerce. After 7 days of work, the new Adobe Commerce-powered site went live and saw a record of 12,000 simultaneous users. Prior to the upgrade, the site would crash once traffic exceeded 5,000 visitors. Despite this greatly increased level of traffic, the site now performs better than ever; adding to cart takes 1 second or less (it was ranging from 30 seconds to completely failing the previous week), even under this heavy load.
The split scripts are a major reason for the success of this project. Our hosting partner, LexiConn, has reported that the site is doing well and still has room to expand to support more traffic, if needed.
“It definitely helps with spreading out the queries and keeping checkout [and] sales running smoothly,” said Rob, from LexiConn, after noticing a 2,000 visitor spike in traffic from the day before.
The client’s CTO said their primary concern is no longer whether or not the site can scale — it’s that they’ll run out of inventory as they’re selling things so quickly now!
Images Courtesy of New Relic – The graphs show that Adobe Commerce performs with a lower average response time when under a load spike caused by a large number of simultaneous users.
A special thanks to our team members who helped to make this project a success:
Grzegorz M. – Upgrading from Magento Open Source to Magento Commerce
Tomek S. – Code optimizations
Krzysztof P. – Preparing and deploying split database
Adam Ć. – Quality Assurance and deployment
Michael W. – Client communication and project management
Daniel K. – Coordinating and delegating assignments
Jonathan V. – Coordinating server optimizations with LexiConn
