Starting point
The store arrived with another vendor's debt
Quiosque came to us in 2020 as a live, trading store with a catalogue of more than 5,000 styles. The previous vendor had left behind layers of workarounds, technical debt and performance bottlenecks that showed most on phones, where the bulk of purchases happened. In fashion that hurts: traffic swings with the seasons, and photos have to be large and sharp because they are what sells the clothes. We could not take the store offline to tidy it up, nor start from scratch. Every change had to go onto the live system while sales carried on as normal.
What we did
Cleaning up a live store while it kept selling
We started by learning the code and infrastructure, then worked through the slowest views one by one. Every change shipped while the store was trading normally.
- 1
Taking over the code and infrastructure
We took over the repository, servers and deployment process from the previous vendor. We listed the modules, overrides and places where the code bypassed standard Magento mechanisms. From that we set the order of work, tackling first the problems that slowed the store most or risked an outage at peak times.
- 2
Hyvä front-end performance
We focused on the views every customer passes through: the home page, category listings and the product page. We removed bottlenecks in the Hyvä templates, tidied up how images and scripts loaded and kept an eye on Core Web Vitals. On mobile the store scored above 85 in Lighthouse, despite large campaign photography.
- 3
Rolling out Hyvä Checkout
We rolled out Hyvä Checkout, an order flow built on the same technologies as the rest of the front end: Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS. It loads less code than the default Magento checkout, which mattered in a store where most purchases were made on phones. We made the switch without interrupting order taking.
- 4
Ongoing development until 2025
Over the following years we developed the storefront and prepared it for sales peaks. We made sure new features and new seasons in the catalogue did not erode performance, and that a store with more than 5,000 styles behaved predictably under higher traffic.
Outcome
Five years of growth for a store we inherited
The store we took over with technical debt ran fast and reliably for years afterwards. The Hyvä front end with Hyvä Checkout scored above 85 in mobile Lighthouse with high-quality photography, and the 5,000+ style catalogue behaved predictably through seasonal peaks. The engagement ran from 2020 to 2025, and throughout it we developed the live store without pausing sales, one release at a time.
- Code and infrastructure taken over from the previous vendor
- Hyvä front end scoring 85+ in mobile Lighthouse
- Hyvä Checkout rolled out
- Development and maintenance from 2020 to 2025
