How Northfield Outdoors cut load times by 74% moving to a headless storefront.

The Challenge

Northfield's Magento 1 storefront had outgrown itself. Product pages took close to two seconds to respond, checkout dropped customers on mobile, and every catalogue update risked downtime during business hours — with peak season approaching and 40,000 SKUs at stake.

The Approach

We migrated onto Adobe Commerce behind a headless Next.js storefront, mirroring live data on parallel infrastructure until it matched the old site order-for-order. A complete 301 map preserved every indexed URL, and a Varnish caching layer tuned to their traffic shape absorbed peak load. The checkout was rebuilt from the ground up for mobile.

Results

The cutover happened over a single weekend with zero downtime and no loss of search visibility. Organic revenue was up 38% within a month, and the rebuilt checkout lifted conversion by 19%. When Black Friday arrived, the caching layer absorbed a 9x traffic spike without incident.

“They migrated our entire catalogue over a weekend and we didn't lose a single order. Monday morning, the site was just faster.”