E-Commerce Refactor for Medical Retailer

Client: Orthopedic product retailer, 7,000+ SKUs Role: Platform recovery lead — refactor + team leadership

Stack: WordPress/WooCommerce, PHP, React, TypeScript, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, BigQuery

The problem. A WooCommerce platform that couldn't carry its own catalog. Load times so slow users bounced before seeing products. Every release was a manual deploy that risked taking the site down. Legacy JS and PHP buried in brittle theme files — every change slower, riskier, more expensive than the last. The business wasn't losing on demand; it was losing on infrastructure.

What I did. Built and led a dev + QA team focused on stabilizing the highest-risk systems. Mapped the fragile zones across front and back end, replaced heavy legacy JS with modular React components, and refactored the PHP into clean object-oriented structures. Moved key flows to async handling to kill blocking loads, rebuilt the deploy pipeline on GitHub Actions + Docker with a real rollback strategy, and tuned the AWS layer for caching and asset delivery.

+30% site performance; measurably lower bounce

~20% sales growth within 6 months, tied to UX + speed

Deployment failures and support escalations down sharply

Non-technical staff could manage SKUs and promos without engineering

Platform positioned to scale the catalog without breaking delivery