Discover how CETSAT transformed an unstable WooCommerce website into a secure, high performance ecommerce platform through technical auditing, performance optimisation and continuous engineering.
Approximately 15,000 products. Global customers. Continuous technical consultancy.
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“Successful ecommerce is not built by adding more plugins. It is built through better engineering.”
Dave at CETSAT
WordPress and WooCommerce
Approximately 15,000 products
Ongoing optimisation and consultancy
Southern Percussion is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of percussion instruments and accessories, serving musicians, schools, orchestras and educational organisations across the UK and internationally.
With approximately 15,000 products, a global customer base and a reputation built over more than two decades, their ecommerce platform plays a vital role in the success of the business.
When Southern Percussion approached CETSAT, they were not looking for another website. They were looking for answers.
After investing heavily in multiple developers, SEO consultants and hosting providers, they had been left with an ecommerce platform that had become increasingly unstable, expensive to operate and difficult to maintain.
Website outages were affecting sales, customers were struggling to complete purchases and confidence in the platform had reached an all time low.
Every ecommerce website experiences occasional technical challenges. Southern Percussion’s situation was different.
The business had experienced repeated periods of website instability, unexplained performance degradation and what was initially believed to be a large scale Distributed Denial of Service attack.
The attacks appeared serious enough for the business to involve Action Fraud, the police and cyber security specialists while investigating the source of the traffic. At one point, there were genuine concerns about the long term impact on the business.
Despite investing in premium hosting and external consultancy, the problems continued.
Customers would sometimes experience an exceptionally fast website. Hours later, the same website could become almost unusable. Orders would fail, pages would become unresponsive and staff were regularly forced to ask customers to telephone their orders through instead.
The website had become unpredictable.
Rather than proposing another rebuild, we began with a complete technical audit.
Our investigation quickly revealed that the underlying problems extended far beyond website design.
The platform contained more than forty active plugins, numerous bespoke plugins, significant technical debt and a heavy reliance on hosting specific optimisation features.
This meant the website had become closely tied to a particular hosting provider, making migration both expensive and technically challenging.
While each individual decision may have solved a short term problem, together they created an increasingly complex platform that was difficult to maintain, troubleshoot and optimise.
Our philosophy is different. Wherever possible we reduce complexity rather than add to it.
One of the biggest lessons from this project reflects a wider trend within the software industry.
Artificial Intelligence has made it possible for almost anyone to generate code. Used correctly, AI is an incredibly powerful engineering tool. At CETSAT we use AI every day to improve productivity, accelerate research and assist our experienced developers.
However, generating code is only a small part of software engineering.
Understanding architecture, security, scalability, performance and long term maintainability requires experience that AI alone cannot replace.
Throughout this project we identified numerous examples where additional plugins and bespoke components had been introduced to solve relatively straightforward problems.
Each additional layer increased maintenance overhead, reduced performance and made diagnosing future issues considerably more difficult.
Our objective was not simply to fix problems as they appeared, but to reduce technical debt and simplify the platform wherever possible.
“Our objective was not simply to redesign the website. It was to understand the underlying problems.”
A fast homepage does not necessarily mean a fast ecommerce platform.
Southern Percussion manages approximately 15,000 products across a complex catalogue with advanced product filtering, international customers, multiple tax rules and numerous third party integrations.
Optimising a website of this scale requires far more than installing a caching plugin.
Throughout the project we continually reviewed hosting configuration, caching strategy, database performance, image optimisation, JavaScript delivery, CSS loading, WooCommerce configuration and Core Web Vitals.
Every improvement was measured to ensure the customer experience improved without compromising functionality.
Modern ecommerce websites face constant automated attacks.
Some are harmless search engine crawlers. Others are aggressive product scraping tools, API harvesters or automated bots attempting to consume server resources.
As our investigation progressed it became clear that while Southern Percussion had previously experienced a genuine DDoS attack, much of the ongoing traffic affecting the website was actually a combination of aggressive automated crawling, product scraping and poorly behaved bots.
Understanding the difference was critical.
Rather than applying blanket blocks that risked affecting legitimate customers or search engines, we analysed Cloudflare firewall events, request patterns, autonomous system numbers, user agents and application behaviour to identify exactly what was happening.
This allowed us to develop increasingly intelligent Cloudflare firewall rules, managed challenges, rate limiting policies and bot mitigation strategies that significantly reduced unnecessary server load while protecting legitimate visitors.
One of the most overlooked files on any ecommerce website is robots.txt.
Many businesses view it purely as an SEO tool. In reality, it also plays an important role in website performance.
Without careful configuration, search engines and automated crawlers can waste significant amounts of time crawling filtered product pages, search parameters, sorting options and other dynamically generated URLs that provide little value.
This unnecessarily consumes server resources while reducing the amount of time search engines spend crawling valuable content.
By refining crawl rules alongside improvements to canonical URLs, XML sitemaps and Cloudflare protection, we helped ensure that both legitimate search engines and the website itself could operate far more efficiently.
Firewall rules, managed challenges, rate limiting and bot mitigation.
Caching, database behaviour, catalogue structure and plugin review.
robots.txt, XML sitemaps, canonical URLs and search engine visibility.
Continuous optimisation as the platform and threat landscape evolve.
Unlike many website projects, our work did not finish after launch.
Since taking over the platform we have continued to optimise performance, strengthen security, improve search engine visibility, refine product feeds, support Google Merchant Centre, enhance WooCommerce functionality and respond to new challenges as they emerge.
As cyber threats evolve, search engine algorithms change and customer expectations increase, the platform continues to evolve alongside them.
This ongoing partnership ensures Southern Percussion benefits not only from a modern ecommerce website, but from continuous technical expertise.
Today, Southern Percussion benefits from a far more resilient ecommerce platform supported by proactive monitoring, ongoing optimisation and long term technical consultancy.
The website is now supported by a clearer technical strategy, improved monitoring and a more structured approach to resolving issues.
Technical debt, plugin dependency and hosting specific assumptions were reviewed so the platform could be managed more effectively.
The business now has an ecommerce platform supported by continuous optimisation, security improvements and technical consultancy.
The project demonstrates that successful ecommerce websites are not built through one off redesigns or short term fixes. They are created through careful engineering, continuous optimisation and an understanding that performance, security, SEO and user experience are all closely connected.
We engineer secure, scalable ecommerce platforms that continue to evolve long after launch.
CETSAT Ltd, Yeovil and London
Whether your website is struggling with performance, security, SEO, scalability or long term maintainability, we can help you understand the problem and build a practical way forward.
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