Candle Creations

Candle Creations is a very (!) busy WordPress / WooCommerce store - they're NZ's leading supplier of candle and soap making supplies, with dozens of orders per hour at peak times. When the client came to me they were in desperate need of help, their server was crashing regularly and their developers (based in Asia) seemed to have no idea what to do. The client was regularly up at 5am on the phone, trying to get things resolved. Not fun.

First thing I did was move them to a new server that I built, so I could be sure they had the resources they needed. I then did some deep-dive performance analysis: MySQL, PHP. I found a few problems which I was able to solve, but the big one was their remote stock management and fullfillment provider was essentially hitting their site with a denial of service attack due to poor implementation of their API integration - this caused MySQL to lock up and then... crash!

I worked with the client and their provider to help them fix it up. Now it all runs smooth as silk and barely breaks a sweat, even when EDM's go out and their site gets hit with hundreds of users.