“Partnering with JetRails has been like fitting a custom-made piece of furniture into the heart of our business, and we’re thrilled to see the immediate results. Their work has made our website not just a place to shop, but a true extension of the Furnitureland South experience.”
Executive Director of Information Technology
Furnitureland South is the world’s largest furniture store. Nestled in Jamestown, North Carolina, it boasts well over 1.3 million square feet of showroom space. The company has been in business since 1969 and partners with the largest number of vendors worldwide offering a vast variety of furniture and accessories as well as expert design consultation. Merchandise is sold within all 48 states and transported by their own fleet of trucks maintaining their White Glove delivery guarantee throughout the continental United States. They also sell internationally with visitors to their showroom from all corners of the globe and an impressive roster of celebrity clients dedicated to their selection, quality and excellent prices.
As an industry leader with an established brand and significant website traffic, Furnitureland South wanted to ensure seamless and extremely fast website navigation for customers. The objective was clear – their online presence was an extension of the physical store and should maintain the tradition of excellence and customer satisfaction that has been a cornerstone of their business.
With a single server hosting environment, website speed and performance were not in alignment with the company’s standards. The platform was undersized for their consistently growing influx of daily visitors and was not scalable to accommodate for peaks in traffic patterns.
The Google Indexing robot was also causing an additional strain to the site during scheduled crawls. Web pages loaded slowly, producing lower page rank which drastically affecting SEO and search engine rankings.
The JetRails analyzed the website. Working in partnership with Furnitureland South’s incredibly dedicated and responsive technology team, implementations were put in place creating immediate results.
The initial phase required that the site be migrated to a JetRails hosting platform. The new deployment consisted of a Magento-specific clustered environment which was properly sized and offered easy scalability to accommodate peaks in user traffic. This also optimized the delivery of static content as well as a dedicated MySQL data storage which further decrease load and increase speed.
Once stability was ensured, the JetRails proprietary stack delivered caching at multiple layers. The Amasty full-page cache was added to boost performance by sorting and creating easy retrieval of static content on the site. The JetRails team also added Redis, which optimizes storage of sessions and backend cache on the clustered environment. Cloudflare was deployed for load balancing on multiple servers to distribute content more effectively, especially for international traffic.
Additionally, minification and image compression were put in place to reduce the load time of css, js, html and media components of the site.
Furniturelandsouth.com is one of the fastest sites in its industry. The site is performing optimally with much higher conversion rates and greater revenue generation. Their site’s Time to First Byte (TTFB) loads at .072, and the page fully loads within a 2-second range.
