Careshop: Rescuing a Struggling Magento Store and Getting It to Go-Live

Client

Careshop (Switzerland)

Platform

Magento 2

Industry

Outdoor, Mobility & Wellness Retail

Scope

Rescue, optimisation & go-live support

Live site

careshop.ch

Careshop sells outdoor, mobility and wellness products across Switzerland — a four-language market where a webshop speaks German, French, Italian and English or it doesn't sell. The store arrived with us in poor technical shape: a backlog of unresolved issues, slow pages and a launch plan at risk. Our job was not to build something new. It was to make what existed work — the discipline that defines our Magento development practice as much as any greenfield build.

The Challenge: A Store in Trouble, a Deadline That Wasn't Moving

Rescue projects have a different texture from builds. There is no spec — there is a bug list, a slow homepage and a nervous owner. The first weeks are archaeology:

• An open-issue backlog spanning checkout behaviour, catalogue display and admin workflows
• Page-speed problems severe enough to threaten both conversion and ad economics
• Four language store views (DE/FR/IT/EN) multiplying every content and testing task
• No affiliate infrastructure for the partner-driven marketing the business planned

What We Did

Clear the Backlog First

We triaged and resolved every outstanding issue before touching anything new — because optimising a broken store just gets you to the wrong answer faster. Checkout quirks, attribute display bugs, admin friction: closed, verified, documented.

A Full Magento Performance Overhaul

Then the speed work: full-page caching done properly, image optimisation, JavaScript payload cuts and database housekeeping — the same discipline we sell as page speed optimisation, applied to a store that needed every second back. Swiss shoppers pay premium prices for premium experiences; a slow store reads as an untrustworthy one.

Four Languages, One Catalogue

Careshop runs Switzerland's full language set as Magento store views over a single catalogue — manage the product once, sell it in four languages. We kept that architecture healthy through the overhaul so content teams never had to duplicate work.

An Affiliate System and the Road to Go-Live

With the foundation stable we added the affiliate system the marketing plan depended on — partner tracking wired into Magento's order flow — and stayed on through launch: monitoring, hotfixes and the unglamorous support that turns a go-live from an event into a non-event.

The Results: From 40 to 97 on Mobile

The overhaul was measured, not asserted. On mobile — the view most Swiss shoppers arrive on — Google PageSpeed on the home page climbed from a failing 40 to 97, with the other three Lighthouse categories following it up. Product pages, where the buying decision is made, told the same story: mobile Performance went from 38 to 95.

The Speed a Shopper Actually Feels

Lighthouse scores are a proxy; what matters is how long a customer waits. Add to cart took four seconds — traced to an overload of database queries, many of them duplicates firing on every request. We cut the redundant query work out and brought it down to one second on the store's shared six-core CPU. The cart page carried the same bottleneck, and the same fix brought it back in line.

The Technology Stack

• Magento 2 — multi-store catalogue across DE/FR/IT/EN Swiss store views
• Performance overhaul — caching, image pipeline, JS payload and database tuning
• Affiliate system — partner tracking integrated into the order lifecycle
• Go-live support — monitoring and rapid-response engineering through launch

In our experience, rescue engagements are where an agency's honesty shows. The temptation is to propose a rebuild; the responsible answer is usually to fix what exists — a fraction of the cost, and the retail business keeps trading the whole time.

Inherited a Store That Needs Rescuing?

If your Magento store limps — a backlog nobody closes, speed nobody fixes — you probably don't need a rebuild; you need a team that finishes things. Talk to our engineers: we'll audit what you have and tell you honestly whether it's a rescue or a rebuild, within a business day.