Thermador: Streamlining e-commerce with speed & security

Thermador

Thermador is a luxury kitchen appliance company driven by thoughtful design and industry- leading technology. 

Services Provided

The Challenge

Thermador tasked Red Door to update and improve their blog, which had been running on outdated application versions and with older plugins that introduced security vulnerabilities, slower load times, and worsening SEO performance. 

Our Approach

After taking the time to understand the security risks Thermador’s WordPress blog posed and their need for more efficiency, we developed a sound strategy that involved migrating from AWS to a managed hosting solution on WP Engine, resulting in a blog that is faster, better protected, and easier to manage.

RED DOOR X THERMADOR

Thermador needed a better performing blog to accommodate shoppers looking to upgrade their kitchen appliances. By migrating hosting solutions and updating its tech stack, Red Door delivered a seamless user experience free of security vulnerabilities and full of opportunity.

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ENHANCING THE USER EXPERIENCE 

Our tactics included: 

  1. Migrating from AWS to a managed hosting solution on WP Engine to simplify maintenance. 

  2. Establishing automated Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Deployment (CD) pipelines to make page deployment faster. 

  3. Resolving security vulnerabilities by updating PHP, plugins, and upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. 

  4. Replacing the global website hero for improved page performance. 

EXCEEDING GOALS: BETTER PERFORMANCE FOR FASTER-SELLING PRODUCTS 

Red Door’s development team recommended a migration from AWS to WP engine to combat security vulnerabilities and  requirements needed  deliver a more efficient website for Thermador. 

Goal 1: Migrate from AWS to WP Engine 

We needed to migrate from AWS to WP Engine to combat security vulnerabilities and ensure a better-performing website. Because the source and destination WordPress instances are required to be the same version, our team had to stand up Thermador’s old site in our local development environment and upgrade it to match the version that WP Engine supported. We then used WP Engine’s migration tool to seamlessly import the updated database. Successful migration allowed us to offer hosting optimized for WordPress so that managing and maintaining the instance was easier to do moving forward. 

Goal 2: Establish automated CI/CD pipelines

Thermador’s current blog leveraged a single production instance and no automated CI/CD pipelines, making the deployment process manual—and challenging. CI/CD pipelines are important because they help streamline the development process, improve code quality, allow for rapid and frequent delivery of code change, reduce the risk of introducing issues into the codebase, and encourage collaboration and continuous improvement among team members.  

To follow our recommended release management and DevOps best practices, we set up two lower environments: one for development and one for staging. We established CI/CD pipelines between the Bitbucket repositories and WP Engine to effectively and safely deploy the needed changes to the blog.  

Goal 3: Update PHP, plugins, and the latest WordPress

In order to address the outdated plugins incompatible with the newest version of PHP running on the website, we replaced them with newer ones. We permanently removed all unused plugins to lighten the page weight and reduce unnecessary JavaScript scripts from running. And to address page speed performance, we leveraged WP Engine’s Advanced DNS Network and Advanced Network Cache — DNS-level Cache powered by Cloudflare. 

Goal 4: Replace the global website hero

The global website hero was leveraging a custom plugin using PHP requests to aggregate images from all blog detail pages into one hero image making the site slow and laggy, so we replaced it with a lightweight static image. By enhancing the hero, removing unused plugins, and leveraging new lighter-weight plugins along with the powerful WordPress hosting features provided by WP Engine, we saw significant improvements in our Google PageSpeed scores—as well as a sleek and more elevated design. 





THE PROOF IS IN THE PAGE PERFORMANCE

The Google Lighthouse performance scores of the Thermador blog homepage on desktop reported a 217% increase from 23 to 73, while on mobile we saw a 17.5% increase from 57 to 67. For the blog detail pages, on desktop, a 423% increase was reported from 13 to 68, and on mobile, we saw a 37.5% increase from 56 to 77. Additionally, all security issues were resolved on our first scan. 


IS YOU WORDPRESS SITE OUTDATED AND RUNNING ON OLDER PLUGINS THAT AFFECT THE USER EXPERIENCE AND MAKE IT DIFFICULT TO MAINTAIN?

Migrating to WP Engine may be a good solution for you. Reach out to Red Door today to learn more about our digital business solutions and how we can help update your site so you can get better results.