E-commerce transformation
An inherited online store for a US wellness brand in our group: live payments, a vendor theme edited in place for years, and no safe place to change anything. The job was to make it changeable without breaking a live business.
Make it safe to change
I set up a full staging clone with payments, email, trackers and indexing switched off, plus a guard that refuses any write aimed at the wrong site.
I added source control and CI/CD: pushes to main deploy to staging automatically, while production deploys need a version tag and a reviewer. A rollback drill was run before any real release.
Every change that lives in the database is recorded as a replayable script, so going to production is a checklist with a way back for every step, not a weekend of clicking.
Take the code back
About 210 custom code units were buried in a 3,000-line modified vendor theme. I moved them into an owned, namespaced plugin and a child theme, behind feature flags that switch off instantly, with PHPUnit tests and smoke tests.
A security and code audit found a critical order-authorization flaw, publicly exposed files and 10 components with known vulnerabilities, three of them rated high.
Make it fast and measurable
Redesigned storefront templates and performance work moved the release candidate's mobile Lighthouse scores from 54 to 84 on the homepage and from 47 to 71 on category pages.
Analytics and consent were rebuilt from scratch: Tag Manager, GA4 and default consent states, together with an SEO pass over hundreds of products.