The challenge
Every November, Harbor & Vine’s plugin-heavy storefront slowed to a crawl or went down entirely right as their biggest sales event of the year began.
Our approach
We moved the storefront to a headless architecture decoupled from the parts of the stack most likely to fail under load, then load-tested against six times their historical peak traffic before we’d call the project done — not after launch, before it.
The result
The site handled a 6x traffic surge on Black Friday without a single outage, and page load times during peak stayed under 1.2 seconds — faster than their normal Tuesday average the year before.
“Every other November we budgeted for a crisis. This year we just watched the sales come in.” — E-commerce Manager, Harbor & Vine