Case Study - Performance overhaul and ongoing maintenance for global key retailer
Comprehensive optimization and maintenance for a WooCommerce store shipping worldwide, including cleanup of legacy code, performance tuning, and streamlined operations.
Client
Year
2023
Service
WooCommerce Maintenance, Performance Optimization, Ongoing Support
Overview
We Love Keys is a London-based locksmith and key retailer shipping to customers worldwide. Years of development had left the site with performance issues, redundant code, and maintenance challenges.
We performed a full-stack optimization - removing legacy bloat, rewriting slow components, and establishing a maintenance workflow that keeps the site fast and secure month after month.
Overview
We Love Keys has been in the locksmith business for over 20 years, with an online store that serves customers across the globe. Their WooCommerce site carries thousands of SKUs - from dimple keys and tubular keys to specialist safe and lift keys. The site had been built and modified by several developers over the years, and it showed: conflicting CSS from three different themes (two of which were no longer active), JavaScript files loading on every page regardless of need, and a checkout process that made unnecessary API calls to services that had been decommissioned years ago.
The site wasn’t broken - but it was slow, hard to maintain, and becoming increasingly fragile with every WordPress and WooCommerce update. Plugin updates would occasionally break the product filtering system because of hard-coded overrides buried in the theme.
We started with a thorough codebase audit, documenting every custom modification, unused asset, and unnecessary dependency. Then we systematically cleaned house: removed 12 unused plugins and 3 inactive themes, consolidated scattered custom code into a properly structured child theme, and eliminated over 800KB of dead CSS and JavaScript that loaded on every page.
The product catalog got special attention. With thousands of keys organized by brand, type, and purpose, the filtering and search experience is critical. We rebuilt the product filtering to use AJAX-powered queries with proper indexes, added Elasticsearch for the search functionality, and implemented smart caching that invalidates only when relevant products change. The multilingual setup (6 languages) was streamlined to reduce translation overhead without losing coverage.
Ongoing, we provide monthly maintenance: security updates, performance monitoring, WooCommerce compatibility testing before major updates, and incremental optimizations based on real user analytics.
What we did
- Codebase Audit & Cleanup
- WooCommerce Optimization
- Search Implementation
- Multilingual Optimization
- Ongoing Maintenance
- Performance Monitoring
- Dead code removed
- 800KB
- Unused plugins removed
- 12
- Languages maintained
- 6
- Maintenance cycles
- Monthly