VitallyLifeWordPress E-commerce Development: Custom Front-End & High Performance
Case study of a supplements & medical e-shop. Built a custom JS cart, developed a tailored plugin, and achieved a 90+ PageSpeed score
The owner of a dietary supplement store and biohacking clinic reached out to me. The goal was to update the current WordPress site while preserving all products, categories, and existing functionality.
Background info: the site took over 8 seconds to load, was bloated with unnecessary code and plugins, and suffered from typical issues associated with an old Elementor-based site. Performance metrics were: PageSpeed 81, SEO 54.
After the layout work, the WordPress integration phase began. Although the new product page structure differed from the old one, it was simpler, so this part did not cause any particular issues.
However, there was still the issue of the shopping cart, which by default in WooCommerce only works via AJAX and triggers a full page refresh every time a new product is added. Therefore, it was decided to develop a custom cart that integrates seamlessly with the standard WooCommerce checkout form.
The next items were the contact forms. Standard “Contact Forms” plugins were not suitable because they lacked the proper functionality to easily build custom forms that would work well with the theme without needing to override styles by tag, and again, the submission process was clunky and provided no feedback. Consequently, I decided to develop a separate, custom plugin specifically for this site.
Immediately after setting up easy configuration and viewing submitted requests, the question of security arose. Therefore, I implemented nonce verification and restricted the ability to submit more than one form without a page refresh. Of course, protecting a public form is not a trivial task, but in this case, the goal was not to stop millions of requests per second, but simply to prevent spam. This architecture handles that quite well.
Below is the entire homepage of the site. All menus and links are editable from the admin panel, and the most frequently ordered items are dynamically populated in the product sections.
With that, the project development was completed. The site has been running without any issues ever since. WordPress was recently updated to 7.0.0, and thanks to the proper architecture and theme implementation, there were no problems at all.
Yes, it’s AI-translated image. Thank you, Nano Banana 2. 100/100 is a pretty bad result, right?