Re-platforming a legacy storefront for speed and conversion

Legacy storefronts rarely fail all at once — they slow down a few hundred milliseconds a year until checkout abandonment quietly becomes the norm. Deloitte and Google's joint 'Milliseconds Make Millions' research found a 0.1-second mobile speed improvement correlates with an 8.4% conversion lift in retail, and Google's own published Core Web Vitals case studies show real sites (AliExpress, NDTV) cutting bounce rate materially after fixing LCP and CLS.

Where the time actually goes

Before touching any code, we profile the real bottleneck — render-blocking third-party scripts, an unindexed database query on the product page, or a monolithic checkout flow that can't be cached at all. The chart below shows the kind of before/after split a typical re-platform targets, based on the published Google/AliExpress and NDTV case studies.

Why incremental beats a full rewrite

A big-bang rewrite is the single riskiest way to modernize a revenue-generating storefront — it freezes feature work for months and bets the whole migration on one cutover night. The strangler-fig pattern instead puts a new headless Next.js frontend in front of the existing catalog and inventory systems from day one, so the storefront keeps taking orders throughout, and each service — checkout, search, account — cuts over independently once it's proven in production.

This pairs naturally with a broader accessibility pass too — a re-platform is the cheapest moment to fix WCAG gaps, since our accessibility remediation blueprint shows the same component-level work needed for performance (semantic markup, reduced DOM complexity) also closes most common accessibility failures.