Earlier Work: ADEO Group
Head of Technology, ADEO Group · 2009–2020
The Project
This project was delivered while working as Head of Technology at ADEO Group, a Glasgow digital agency. It is not Born Creative project work.
St Andrews First Aid, a charity, needed an ecommerce platform to carry a catalogue of around 50,000 items. WordPress is not the platform most people would choose at that scale. I owned the specification, architecture and code, and built it to cope.
It remains the largest WordPress build the agency produced.
Key Deliverables
01
Around 50,000 products managed through WordPress, well beyond the scale most WordPress ecommerce builds are designed for.
02
Database structure, caching and query optimisation work specifically aimed at keeping a catalogue that size fast to browse and search.
03
A not-for-profit client with the same performance and reliability expectations as a commercial one, delivered on the same budget realities charities work within.
Our Approach
WordPress and WooCommerce are built around assumptions that break down somewhere well short of 50,000 products: page load times, admin usability, search performance. Getting there took deliberate work on database indexing, query structure and caching, rather than treating it as a default WooCommerce install.
Specification and architecture were owned from the start, which meant the catalogue structure was designed for scale from day one rather than retrofitted once problems appeared.
Tech Stack
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