Dr. Max significantly improves system speed and stability

About the brand

Dr.Max Poland is a part of an international holding, Dr.Max - the leader on the pharmaceutical market in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, with more than 2,000 pharmacies in 8 European countries. The stationary sales network of the brand in Poland consists of more than 500 pharmacies. It also provides its customers throughout the country with access to a wide online offer, which includes dermocosmetics, medical devices, private label products, and many others. Thanks to its diverse offer, easy availability, and well-thought-out strategy, it has become the market leader in online pharmacies. With this scale of development and recognition, the client needed its system to be stable, secure, and efficient.

Challenges

Despite an established position, the client struggled with system instability. It manifested itself in frequent store downtime and many errors appearing. Additionally, the average page load time was significantly too long. All of this had an impact not only on brand image issues and users' shopping experience but also on shopping safety.

In order to remedy this, we started our work by conducting an audit, which allows learning the details of the operation of the entire system, its architecture, and to indicate the areas of implementation responsible for the potentially low efficiency of the service. The results of such an audit allow us to prepare appropriate recommendations of changes that are worth introducing to the service in order to improve its efficiency. 

Step by step audit

Step 1

System analysis for: 

• implementation architectures
• system configuration
• traffic volume,
• number of users
• products
• integration
  

Step 2 

Analyze the server environment configuration for: 

• connections and services
• server architecture
• correctness of the environment
• system requirements
  

Step 3

Performance monitoring and code analysis for: 

• server infrastructure
• databases, PHP scripts,
• scripts execution,
• content building
• site code analysis
• loading speed analysis
  

Step 4

Recommendation and identification of bottlenecks 

1. The result of this stage is an inventory of the architecture of the entire Magento system implementation.
2. Expert evaluation of server environment configuration to identify opportunities for performance improvement. 
3. Analysis of Magento system behavior on production servers, code analysis, and site loading speed.
4. Summary meeting with expert evaluation, an indication of problem areas, and recommendations for further actions.

‍

‍

New Relic - real-time monitoring

With complex implementations, as it is in the case of drmax.pl, an extremely useful tool to maintain full efficiency and productivity of the system is software allowing for real monitoring of the entire application, and not just the servers. Therefore, we used the New Relic APM technology. Such a tool allows checking and optimizing the application during its daily work. It also allows to effectively and quickly eliminate errors in the entire service. 

New Relic technology enables, among other things, quick identification of bottlenecks and resolution of system performance issues. Moreover, it allows monitoring the application in many aspects, starting from end-user experience, through hosting services, to the code, all in one user interface. - says Robert Żochowski, IT Director at Strix

Measuring and increasing customer satisfaction

A special index - Apdex - is responsible for measuring user satisfaction in New Relic. It takes into account many factors such as the user's waiting time for the page to load and for it to be displayed. On its basis, we obtained information not only on the condition of our system but also on the level of satisfaction of drmax.pl customers. 

Recommendations after the audit

The audit lasted two weeks, including a minimum of one week of application monitoring. Based on the results of the audit, we prepared appropriate recommendations for the client, the implementation of which helped to improve the work of the entire website.

Sample list of client recommendations:

1. Fix critical problems and bugs in system operation that may cause side effects during the development of new features in addition to system malfunction. 
   

2. Necessary improvement of the system security.
   

3. An updated version of Magento that includes many performances and security improvements. Elimination of system modifications that were made without following the standards and best practices for the Magento system.
   

4. Upgrade add-on modules that not only fix bugs and eliminate security vulnerabilities, but also extend functionality.
   

5. Performance and speed improvements that impact overall customer satisfaction and cost of hosting services. Removing bottlenecks, increasing the use of cache mechanisms, and using the full page cache mechanism.
   

6. Disabling unused modules of the Magento system, which benefits in the form of a significant improvement in speed.

‍

Optimization of system operation based on audit recommendations

• elimination of critical security flaws 
• increase in site loading speed by 50%
• Rebuilding the server infrastructure, optimizing the Amazon environment, while reducing hosting costs
• optimization of the average server response time to 0.5 sec
• increase in customer satisfaction 
• increase in system performance and stability 
• Upgrade from Magento 2.2.4 to 2.2.10 
• implementation and graphic design of the second delivery option: specialist courier, delivers drugs at the right temperature 
• Blog page optimization
• Optimization of the product images loading in the product view
• Optimization of the delivery counter on the product card
  
  

Our approach to the implementation of this service is based on the experience and good practices developed on projects while working with Magento 2 system.