The challenge
A storefront that shared its fate with the backend
The client ran a traditional monolithic WordPress store. Performance was capped by the legacy theme and plugin layer, every release carried downtime risk, and the storefront shared resources with the backend, so traffic spikes or heavy admin operations degraded the shopper experience.
The solution
A decoupled headless architecture
The WordPress backend was kept as the system of record for catalog, orders, and fulfilment. The customer-facing storefront was rebuilt as an independent modern frontend. The two were fully decoupled across a clean API boundary.
WordPress backend
System of record: catalog, orders, fulfilment
Headless storefront
Containerized frontend on Kubernetes + CDN
Backend kept as the system of record
The WordPress backend stays authoritative for catalog, orders, and fulfilment. It now runs on a dedicated delivery path that bypasses the legacy caching bottleneck, so admin work never competes with shopper traffic.
Containerized frontend on Kubernetes
The customer-facing storefront was rebuilt as an independent modern frontend, containerized and run on Kubernetes behind a global CDN: horizontally scalable, with no single point of failure.
Multi-layer caching
A dedicated Redis cache tier, application-level incremental regeneration, and CDN edge caching work together. An automatic cache-warming service keeps key pages pre-rendered, so shoppers rarely hit a cold page.
Zero-downtime delivery
Every release ships without interruption
Rolling deployments on Kubernetes
New versions roll out across replicas in roughly 25 seconds with no interruption to live traffic.
Build once, distribute everywhere
A single build artifact is distributed with a controlled rolling restart, and a selective edge-cache purge is wired into every release.
Order-queue resilience
If the backend is briefly unreachable, incoming orders are buffered and retried automatically. No order is lost.
Isolated environment
No shared failure domain
Backend, frontend, and cache each run on isolated, dedicated resources. Caches fail closed and serve last-known-good content. There is no shared failure domain between the shop customers see and the system the team operates.
The results
Faster, busier, and never down
Relative visits, indexed to 100 before migration. Traffic rose 60% after launch.
Scale 0-100, higher is better. 90+ is the green band.
Performance
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO
Lab figures, to be re-verified against a fresh PageSpeed Insights run before publishing.
rolling deploy, zero downtime
Traditional deploy
downtime window
This pipeline
~25s, 0 downtime
Zero downtime recorded since launch.
Infrastructure stack
What the platform runs on
Designed, built, and operated by Private DevOps LTD.
Services applied