Stronghold Safety Case Study

The Business

For over 15 years, Stronghold Safety has been a trusted partner in helping industrial workplaces operate safer and more productively. With expertise exceeding 100 years in machine safety, their team adeptly balances compliance, safety, and efficiency to enhance industrial operations. Stronghold Safety specializes in bespoke solutions that mitigate risks and safeguard operations without sacrificing productivity.

As industry leaders in machine safety solutions, Stronghold Safety combines seasoned industrial experience with a fervent commitment to safety. This unique position enables them to serve as both consultants and allies in ensuring workplace safety. To scale their digital presence and streamline operations, Stronghold Safety partnered with us to migrate from Magento to BigCommerce and implement a cutting-edge Headless architecture, enhancing product page functions and introducing advanced Search & Filter capabilities on category pages.

The Objective

Stronghold Safety’s project aimed to overcome the limitations of their Magento platform by building a scalable, high-performance solution tailored to their needs. Key project objectives included:

Enhanced Speed and Robustness: Alleviate slow load times on product and category pages to ensure a fast, reliable user experience, vital for customers navigating complex industrial products.

Simplified SEO and Content Management: Facilitate efficient creation and management of SEO-friendly static pages. Integrate Contentful to allow non-technical users to update and optimize content independently, boosting SEO performance.

Improved Support for Complex Product Structures: Address inefficiencies and limitations in managing “kit” products and variants, ensuring seamless product configurations and enhanced user experiences.

Advanced Search and Filtering Capabilities: Implement Elasticsearch and Optimum7’s S&F functionality to provide fast, precise search experiences with industrial product attribute filters and instant search suggestions.

Future-Proof Scalability: Build a flexible platform capable of accommodating future growth, integrations, and customizations, leveraging BigCommerce Catalyst with Vercel for adaptable Headless architecture.

The Strategy

Planning and Design

• Conducted a thorough analysis of Stronghold Safety’s needs and pain points, ensuring solutions were tailored to their specific challenges.
• Created Figma-based designs that maintained brand integrity while enhancing user-friendliness.
• Prioritized static content and product pages for optimal user experiences and SEO success.
• Collaborated with the marketing team to align Contentful integration with marketing strategies.
• Researched and designed product page structures best suited to their complex product ecosystem.

Technical Execution

• Data Migration: Seamlessly migrated customer records, product data, and blogs from Magento to BigCommerce, ensuring data integrity and minimal disruption.
• Contentful Integration: Transitioned all static content to Contentful, enabling simplified and flexible content management.
• Headless Architecture: Developed using BigCommerce Catalyst and integrated with Vercel, leveraging Next.js and GraphQL for a fast, modular frontend.
• Advanced Search and Filtering: Employed Elasticsearch and Optimum7’s S&F functionality for tailored industrial product search capabilities.
• Iterative QA and UAT: Worked closely with Stronghold Safety during QA and UAT phases to refine features and ensure solutions met client expectations.

Optimization Efforts

• Enhanced speed of complex product pages with kit products and variants to ensure seamless load times and improved user experiences.
• Refactored custom code to boost efficiency and scalability, particularly enhancing search functionality.

Key Features/Functionalities Implemented

• Kit Products as Variants: Managed complex product structures with advanced variant options for kit products.
• Multi Add to Cart Functionality: Enabled customers to order related products directly from the same page, streamlining the purchasing process.
• Content Management with Contentful: Managed static content, including service, lead generation, and blog pages through Contentful for greater flexibility and independence.

Results

The migration of Stronghold Safety to a Headless BigCommerce architecture collaboratively achieved all key objectives, delivering a marked improvement in performance and functionality.

Load times across Product and Category Pages were significantly reduced, resulting in enhanced user satisfaction and lower bounce rates.

The advanced search and filter functionality improved product discovery, leading to increased user engagement and time spent on the site.

Contentful integration empowered the team to independently manage static pages, reducing reliance on developers and accelerating content updates.

SEO performance saw considerable enhancement through SEO-friendly static pages, driving a notable increase in organic traffic and improved search engine rankings.

Overall, the project positioned Stronghold Safety to efficiently scale their operations and digital presence, providing a robust and future-proof platform to support their growth and evolving business needs.