Works | AAW
AAW’s eCommerce Success: A Performance Optimization Case Study
Company Overview
AAW, a prominent name in Kuwait’s retail and wholesale sector, and represents over 200 global brands. Named after its founder, Ali Abdulwahab Al Mutawa Commercial Co.
AAW is dedicated to upholding his guiding principle: delivering the best quality products, services, and customer experiences in a sustainable manner. The multi-faceted company operates across several industries and runs various eCommerce websites catering to a wide customer base in both English and Arabic.
Objectives & Challenges
AAW’s main goal was to improve the performance of their eCommerce website to deliver fast and seamless customer experience. However, they encountered several challenges:
High Infrastructural Costs
AAW was incurring heavy infrastructure costs to prevent downtime and handle website traffic, but these investments didn’t yield the required result. Consequently, they were compelled to increase server capacity due to poor website performance, which was a costly solution.
Slow Loading Times
Several of their critical web pages including category pages, product pages, cart, and checkout page began exhibiting slow loading times. This took a toll on the website’s performance and potential sales.
Inefficient Caching Setup
While the website had Redis caching in use, it was being used for full page caching, which is not its recommended purpose. The absence of Varnish further aggravated the issue, as the system lacked the capability to serve cache responses effectively. The poor caching setup caused all incoming requests to be processed by the server, overloading resources and contributing to higher operational costs and lower response rates.
Indexing Bottlenecks
The website’s indexing processes were slow resulting in longer backend processing times, impacting both server performance and customer experience. These delays also increased the risk of downtime, further impacting the platforms overall reliability and user satisfaction.
Codilar’s Solution Approach
AAW was in need of comprehensive and efficient platforms that catered to all of its clientele without losing out on user experience. Taking this into account, Codilar created a structured approach to address these challenges and optimize their platforms.
As initially mentioned, AAW’s initial setup lacked Varnish caching, causing server load from frequent requests. By optimizing Varnish caching, we ensured cached responses were efficiently served for frequently requested non-dynamic content, consequently reducing server strain. This enhancement benefited multiple platforms under AAW, including Intersport, JYSK Kuwait, Al Mutawa pharmacies, SNKR, Tasawooq, and the Athlete’s Foot.
Powerlisting Integration
Power Listing is a powerful optimization tool that revolutionizes product listing performance on Magento 2 stores. By ensuring all essential product details—such as titles, prices, images, reviews, and more—are indexed and loaded directly from Elasticsearch, it completely eliminates reliance on MySQL for listing-related data. This approach dramatically reduces load times, enhances scalability, and ensures a seamless user experience even for large catalogs and high-traffic stores. With advanced filtering, intuitive navigation, and faster rendering of product listings, Power Listing transforms the shopping experience while maintaining exceptional performance.
Previously, slow-loading Product Listing Pages (PLPs) were negatively impacting customer shopping experience. We tackled this issue by integrating our Powerlisting tool, which streamlined PLP handling and ensured quicker rendering of product listings.
Backend Efficiency
We were focused on optimizing the Homepage, lagging Product Detail Pages (PDPs), cart, and checkout processes through targeted caching strategies. Custom caching was implemented to minimize the need for database interactions. This drastically reduced load times, and improved site performance.
Efficient Caching
To enhance performance, we implemented efficient caching for frequently accessed elements such as the megamenu and checkout configurations. By utilizing custom caching strategies in Varnish, we ensured strategic content refreshes that maintained optimal performance without disrupting the overall site experience.
Ajax Loading
To improve performance, some of the components were transitioned to load dynamically through Ajax. Elements like related products, cross-sell products, product reviews, and size guides were shifted to Ajax, allowing them to load independently and significantly speed up initial page loads.
Custom Content Caching
To enhance performance further, we implemented custom caching for frequently accessed elements like the megamenu and checkout configuration. Varnish was implemented to strategically cache content with tailored refresh mechanisms ensuring seamless content updates.
Custom Block Caching
There were several elements across AAW’s site such as Area Header and Search Injection blocks that were loaded in multiple locations. These blocks were strategically cached to be fetched from the cache rather than reloaded from the database each time, improving overall page load times.
Besides, PDPs experienced slow performance due to large database interactions. To improve performance, we cached frequently accessed data, such as colour, size attributes etc. which are typically unvarying and do not require frequent updates.
Besides, PDPs experienced slow performance due to large database interactions. To improve performance, we cached frequently accessed data, such as colour, size attributes etc. which are typically unvarying and do not require frequent updates.
Code Optimization
We optimized the core indexing logic in Magento by reducing redundant database queries and skipped disabled store views. Magento-provided patches were used to improve indexing efficiency. In addition, we streamlined product data fetching based on store views, which resulted in faster indexing updates.
Results
and Impact
The improvements led to a significantly better performing platform, with notable results-
- Faster Page Loads: Category and Product pages now load in around 1.2 seconds, enhancing the overall user experience and reducing bounce rates.
- Reduced Infrastructure Costs: By implementing Powerlisting along with Varnish and caching strategies, server loads decreased, allowing AAW to maintain high performance without excessive spending on infrastructure.
- Streamlined Backend Operations: Optimized indexing significantly reduced backend processing times, enabling faster site updates and improved stability.
- Enhanced Stability and Scalability: Real-time monitoring, custom enhancements, and a focus on caching ensured the platforms remained stable even during high traffic periods, ready to scale as needed.
AAW’s eCommerce platform now provides a fast, engaging and reliable shopping experience to all visitors. The technical optimizations pave the way to continued development and scalable opportunities.
