IBO Case Study How we sped up the hunting and gardening website for even greener numbers

The speed of a website is an important evaluative factor from an SEO perspective, as well as for the customer of an e-commerce site and their customer experience – CX. Long loading times and slow responses cause an increased bounce rate and consequently fewer conversions. According to statistics, as much as 83% of users expect a website to load in less than 3 seconds. So how to deal with slow loading? While in some cases advanced software optimization helps, in others it is necessary to take more decisive action and replace the server. The result is then a more responsive website, where a visitor spends more time, which is not only a positive signal for SEO but also a greater likelihood of making a purchase. The same is true for our client IBO.

Thanks to DevOps, we identified the first issues through monitoring. 

In addition to active custom development, we provide our clients with a complete ecosystem called DevOps. Thanks to this sophisticated management of development and operations, we continuously monitor the website's status. This is independent of whether it is our own BUXUS editorial system or another system (WordPress, etc.). As the number of sales commodities and the demand from visitors increased over the years for IBO, the first signal was issues with the disks within the current solution. 

Optimal solution in the form of server replacement 

Before deciding to replace the server, we considered other, less invasive options. Examples include software interventions, such as database optimization, various backend processes, and the like. However, time was also a deciding factor, as the client had been using the previous server for approximately 5 years. For this reason, we concluded that replacing the server with a new one would be the most suitable option, which is also an investment in the future.

Launching the website on a new server 

As part of the preparation, we gathered all the necessary data and key connections (accounting system, etc.) and secured the selected solution so that we could carry out the server replacement in early March 2024 without any problems and significant disruptions to the website's operation. Although the usual solution is to perform the replacement in the shortest possible time frame so that the client does not have to bear the costs of two servers at the same time, in the case of IBO, we temporarily kept the old solution functional. The reason was to capture the still ongoing visits from associated domains, which we then gradually redirected to the new server.