Headless WordPress Storefront

The client's existing WordPress/WooCommerce storefront was functional but slow — Lighthouse scores in the 40s, a bloated page builder plugin stack, and a checkout flow that lost customers on mobile.

Rather than rebuild the whole business on a new platform (and lose years of SEO equity and editorial workflow the marketing team already knew), I decoupled the frontend from WordPress: WordPress stayed as the content/product source of truth via a small custom REST layer, while the actual storefront became a hand-built, static-first frontend with client-side hydration.

Key engineering decisions:

— Custom post types and fields mapped cleanly to a lightweight product API, so the marketing team's existing editorial workflow didn't change at all.

— Critical CSS inlined, everything else deferred; images served as WebP via CDN with explicit dimensions to eliminate layout shift.

— Checkout kept deliberately simple — no heavy cart-state framework, just vanilla JS talking to a couple of focused endpoints.

Result: Lighthouse performance score went from the low 40s to the high 90s, and mobile checkout completion rate improved measurably in the first month post-launch.