Oh Polly | Enterprise Shopify Plus Scaling & Flash Sales Uptime
How Webfilaments re-engineered Oh Polly's Shopify Plus storefront infrastructure to handle high-traffic drops with 99.9% uptime and zero checkout bottlenecks.
// The Challenge
Identifying the bottleneck.
During high-volume clothing drops and flash sales, Oh Polly experienced massive traffic surges exceeding 10,000 concurrent checkout requests per minute. This traffic saturated their legacy database, causing cart drawer lockups, visual layout shifts (CLS), and transaction drops. The critical First Contentful Paint (FCP) slowed to 4.2 seconds under peak loads, resulting in cart abandonment.
// The Solution
Strategic engineering.
We re-architected their checkout pipeline by replacing heavy third-party plugins with a lightweight, custom cart manager built using the Shopify AJAX Cart API. We optimized image layouts by defining explicit aspect-ratio properties and CSS skeletons to eliminate layout shifts. Static elements were cached at the edge using custom Cloudflare Workers, and turnstile bot gates were integrated to filter out malicious scripts. Automated launch workflows were set up using Shopify Plus Launchpad.
// The Impact
Measurable business growth.
Uptime during flash sales reached 99.9%. Page load speeds under peak loads dropped to 1.6s, resulting in an 18% increase in checkout conversions and eliminating server lockouts.
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