Magento 2 eCommerce Store -
2x Faster, 35% Revenue Increase
An Australian specialty retailer was running a slow Magento 1 store with basic search, no subscriptions and no multi-warehouse inventory. Migrated to Magento 2 with Elasticsearch, custom subscription billing and warehouse management delivered in 12 weeks with zero data loss.
The Brief
An Australian specialty retailer had been running on Magento 1 for 6 years. The store was slow (8-second page loads), had basic keyword search with no filtering, couldn't handle subscriptions and had no visibility across multiple warehouse locations. Magento 1 was also approaching end-of-life with no security updates.
The brief was to migrate fully to Magento 2 with a custom theme, Elasticsearch-powered search, subscription billing via Stripe and multi-warehouse inventory tracking all without losing 6 years of product data, customer accounts and order history.
"Our store takes 8 seconds to load. Customers are leaving before they even see our products. We need a modern store but we can't lose our customer history or our product rankings. The migration has to be clean."
Project Phases
Built a custom Python migration script to export all data from Magento 1 - products, customers, orders, categories, CMS pages and reviews and import cleanly into Magento 2 data structures. All product URLs preserved via 301 redirects to protect SEO rankings. Customer accounts migrated with hashed passwords compatible with Magento 2 auth. Zero data loss confirmed with record count verification at every step.
Built a custom Magento 2 theme from scratch clean, fast, mobile-first. No heavy page builder overhead. Integrated Elasticsearch for product search faceted filtering by category, price range, brand, size and availability. Search results return in under 200ms. Redis caching for all category and product pages. Load time reduced from 8s to under 3s on first visit; under 1s for cached pages.
Built a custom Magento 2 subscription module customers choose weekly or monthly delivery frequency at checkout, powered by Stripe recurring billing. Customer portal shows upcoming deliveries, lets them pause, skip a delivery or cancel. Multi-warehouse inventory module shows real-time stock across 3 warehouse locations; orders routed to closest warehouse with available stock.
Varnish cache configured for full-page caching. Images converted to WebP with lazy loading. Magento 2 compiled in production mode. Core Web Vitals all green before launch. Zero-downtime cutover from Magento 1 - DNS switched at midnight, old store kept in read-only mode for 48 hours as backup. No customer-visible issues at launch.
Tech Stack
The Results
"I loved working with Harwinder! Fast, efficient, and a great communicator! Highly recommend!"