Halving page-load times for an 8-figure e-learning store

Challenge

The Great Courses ran a heavily customized Adobe Commerce store with a large digital catalog. Its category and product pages had become slow enough that the conversion funnel visibly suffered.

Custom modules, third-party extensions, integrations and hosting had all grown over time, and each change had made sense on its own. Nobody had a single view of where the time went, so performance work tended to stall on guesses.

Approach

I measured real-user performance first, so every later change could be compared against the same baseline. Then I worked through caching, indexing, database queries, frontend delivery and infrastructure, starting with the changes that would save the most time.

Each fix shipped as a small, reviewable change and was measured again after release. Changes that did not move the numbers were not kept. The work ran alongside the merchant’s regular feature roadmap, so the store kept shipping while it got faster.

At Guidance I also maintained a ScandiPWA headless storefront in production, including the GraphQL layer behind it, and built ERP integrations, subscription billing and custom shipping modules for other 8-figure stores. I reviewed the code of the engineers on those projects and mentored them.

Result

Typical page-load times fell by roughly half. I still start every performance engagement with that baseline.