Performance·E-Commerce · Streetwear·2024·6 weeks

Drop-day traffic was crashing their store. Every time.

Headless commerceCheckout speedInfrastructure

Stackd — visual walkthrough available on request

Results

0

store outages in 6 drops since rebuild

140ms

time-to-interactive on product page (from 4.2s)

100%

of drop inventory sold within 12 minutes

TTI measured via Cloudflare Workers analytics and WebPageTest. Drop sell-through and outage data from Shopify Plus order reports. Load testing conducted via k6 at 50,000 concurrent sessions.

Situation

Stackd runs limited streetwear drops — 500 units, 20,000 concurrent users, sold out in 8 minutes when it works. Their Shopify Plus store was collapsing under load. Three consecutive drops had crashed at peak. They were losing sales and, worse, customer trust. The problem wasn't Shopify — it was the theme architecture, which was making 140 synchronous API calls on page load.

What we did

  1. 01

    Performance audit tracing every network request on the product and cart pages

  2. 02

    Rebuilt product page as a headless component — static shell, dynamic inventory via edge function

  3. 03

    Custom queue system built in Cloudflare Workers to throttle checkout entry without error pages

  4. 04

    Checkout experience rebuilt to pre-populate customer data via cookie for repeat buyers

  5. 05

    Load tested to 50,000 concurrent sessions before the next drop

Tech stack

Shopify PlusCloudflare WorkersEdge functionsk6 load testing

Technical audit

Findings from the pre-engagement audit. All resolved before handoff.

Audit findings6 findings — all resolved
Critical3 issues
Synchronous API calls
140 blocking requests fired on every product page load
12 async edge-cached requests — inventory fetched post-paint
Fixed
Time-to-interactive
4.2s on 4G — store unusable during drop traffic spikes
140ms — static shell served from edge, JS hydrates async
Fixed
Initial page weight
4.2 MB payload — all JS loaded synchronously on PDP
180 KB initial bundle — remainder loaded on interaction
Fixed
High2 issues
Checkout under concurrent load
Shopify checkout erroring at ~2,000 concurrent users
Cloudflare queue throttles entry, zero checkout errors at 50k concurrent
Fixed
JS main thread block
2.8s main thread blocked — no interaction possible during load
0ms main thread block — all heavy work moved to edge function
Fixed
Medium1 issue
Inventory sync accuracy
Polling every 30s — inventory could show as available after sell-out
Cloudflare Durable Objects — inventory state updated in real-time during drops
Fixed

Walkthrough

Full build teardown and before/after demo

Video walkthrough

Full build teardown available on request

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