Suttle-Straus, Inc. (SSI) operates a multi-tenant Adobe Commerce (Magento) platform that hosts dozens of branded e-commerce storefronts for clients. As the platform grew, performance degraded across the board. Pages were slow to load, search results lagged, and the checkout experience suffered from significant latency. The system’s average response time sat at roughly 3 seconds, with more complex requests exceeding 7.5 seconds. An error rate of 50%—driven by millions of deprecation warnings per week—was consuming server resources and compounding the problem.
SSI needed a partner who could diagnose the root causes, implement measurable improvements, and build a roadmap for long-term platform health—all without disrupting the live storefronts that their clients depend on daily.
Novel Minds started by implementing Elastic Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to establish full observability across the Magento instance. Over a four-week analysis period, we instrumented telemetry across every customer-facing endpoint, mapped latency patterns by client and page type, and identified the highest-impact bottlenecks. This data-driven approach ensured that every recommendation was grounded in real production metrics rather than assumptions.
We categorized bottlenecks by difficulty and impact, separating quick wins from deeper architectural challenges. Easy fixes—like unused stylesheet references, render-blocking CSS and JavaScript, and deprecation errors—offered immediate gains. More complex issues, such as external service latency and database architecture constraints inherent to the multi-tenant setup, were mapped into a phased optimization roadmap.
Novel Minds executed a series of targeted application improvements. We leveraged Magento’s built-in Critical Path feature to deliver only the essential 4% of CSS required for initial page rendering, deferring the remaining 96% of unused styles. This alone eliminated render-blocking delays and produced a cascading improvement in cumulative layout shift. We also created custom patches to suppress millions of weekly deprecation warnings generated by core Magento code, reducing the error rate from 50% to under 16% and freeing up server resources on every request.
Beyond the immediate fixes, we delivered a comprehensive optimization roadmap covering cart and checkout bottleneck resolution, caching mechanism improvements, database partitioning for high-traffic clients, and a full DevOps modernization plan including containerized local development, automated build pipelines, and regression testing. We also recommended and scoped proprietary AI assistants for SSI’s technology and customer support teams.
The impact was significant and measurable. Within four months, the platform’s overall performance score increased from 76 to 96—a 26.3% improvement. Key Core Web Vitals saw dramatic gains:
These improvements translated directly to a faster, more reliable experience for every storefront on the platform. The observability infrastructure Novel Minds put in place gives SSI ongoing visibility into performance trends, enabling proactive optimization rather than reactive firefighting.
Novel Minds combined deep Magento expertise with a disciplined, data-driven methodology. By instrumenting observability first, we ensured every optimization was targeted and measurable. By categorizing fixes by effort and impact, we delivered quick wins while building a sustainable roadmap. And by working as an embedded partner within SSI’s team—not as outside consultants handing off a report—we ensured that improvements were implemented, validated, and built to last.
