E-Commerce Store Rescue
February 22, 2018VPS Server Side Optimization
August 20, 2025Case Study: Broken Site → Stable, Fast, and Scalable
A mid-sized business running a heavily customized WordPress stack hit fatal errors after a host upgrade. Pages timed out and transactions failed. Here’s how we stabilized the platform and made it measurably faster.
The Challenge
Multiple aging plugins and custom code fell out of sync after a hosting upgrade. The site began throwing fatal errors, pages timed out, and transactions intermittently failed. Each update introduced new breakage, making recovery risky.
The Fix
I ran a full audit of code, plugins, and server logs. Root issues included outdated dependencies and inefficient database queries. I refactored the problem plugin, updated legacy code for PHP 8 compatibility, optimized heavy queries, and rebuilt the caching strategy. On the server, I tuned PHP‑FPM workers and enabled Redis object caching to stabilize load.
The Outcome
- Site stability restored — no more fatal errors or random 500s.
- Load time reduced by 62% — home page from ~3.8s to 1.4s.
- Core Web Vitals passed across mobile and desktop.
- Admins reported far fewer “white screens of death” and a smoother editor experience.