We sped up projects on Shopsys by up to 63% through upgrading our infrastructure

Shopsys is a leading full-service solution provider for the biggest players in e-commerce, with 17 years of experience and the most cutting edge technologies. They develop tailored e-shops and B2B systems for their clients using their own open-source platform. Their customers include well-known names such as SCONTO Nábytek, Mountfield, Bushman, and Office Depot. The key for Shopsy is reliable and powerful server infrastructure which we have provided for them since 2013.

Infrastructure starting to reach its limits

In autumn 2020 at vshosting~ we noticed that the previous platform solution for the hosting of projects running on the Shopsys framework no longer had large enough performance reserves. In light of the growth of Shopsy projects, the upcoming Christmas season, and the expectation of new client arrivals such as Mountfield, we jointly decided that the solution deserved a comprehensive upgrade.

The entire Kubernetes cluster that Shopsys had with us was completely fine-tuned. For that reason, a hardware upgrade to a more powerful alternative was offered. We didn’t go for anything less than AMD’s extremely powerful servers with EPYC processors each with 32 cores and 64 fibres. A further improvement was to switch to faster NVMe drives.

The upgrade led to a 63% improvement in website load time

The whole process took place on 20th November, 2020 for the database servers and 25th November for the application servers. The result? An average speed increase of Shopsys projects by 55%. Some of them by more than 60%!

A great example is Tropic Fishing,whose load time was already quite fast before the update. On average, it was 586 milliseconds. We managed to bring that down to an unbelievable 357 milliseconds, which represents a 39% improvement.

Tropic Fishing website load speed

A few other examples of Shopsys projects include outdoor clothing store Bushman which saw an improvement in website speed of 56% thanks to a hardware upgrade, for Papírnictví Pavlík it was a 56% improvement, and the electronic store EMOS saw a 63% improvement!

Better SEO and higher availability

SEO experts often talk about how website load speed improves rankings in Google. There is clearly something in this: the boost to the server infrastructure performance led to a growth in search engine visitors by 16%. The click-through rate to the website from search engine results also increased by as much as 5 percentage points!

In the future, we expect even more positive SEO outcomes for the projects running on the Shopsys platform. That is because the impact on search engine optimisation takes a while to be felt. With it comes a snowball effect of a lower bounce rate, and more page views, resulting into that which interests e-commerce sites the most: higher sales. This is only thanks to the modernisation of hardware, and because of these results, the impact of modernisation can be felt within a couple of days.

At vshosting~ we also created replicas for Postgres and Shopysys Elasticsearch. These replicas are to be used to improve the availability of services which for the customer means that if there is an overload, maintenance work, or even a database outrage, the backup is automatically deployed and everything continues as it was.

What have we learnt?

1. A proactive approach is key in hosting – therefore we continuously monitor all clients’ server infrastructure. Then we can address dips in performance before they start to cause issues.
2. Better server performance, in the case of Shopsys => faster page load time – Shopsys projects’ pages loaded an average of 55% quicker.
3. Investment in hardware must yield an immediate return – some e-commerce projects ended up 50% faster. This will significantly improve SEO and help with sales.