SPS Commerce is a large B2B SaaS company whose marketing site runs on WordPress and serves high-volume traffic across many product, resource, and campaign pages. Their site was experiencing poor performance, inconsistent caching behavior, and accessibility issues. I was brought in to support another team by diagnosing the underlying problems and implementing improvements within the constraints of the Divi theme and Pantheon hosting environment.

Tech Stack

My Role

I served as a Performance, Accessibility, & Troubleshooting Specialist (WordPress Support).

Key Contributions

• Conducted a full performance audit using Google PageSpeed Insights and Pantheon-specific debugging tools to identify slowdowns related to Divi, caching conflicts, and heavy page assets.
• Evaluated and tested Redis/Object Cache behavior to understand how Divi’s architecture interacted with Pantheon’s platform caching.
• Installed and configured image compression and optimization plugins to reduce asset weight without harming visual quality.
• Executed targeted SQL queries to clean up unnecessary database entries, improving query performance and reducing bloat.
• Investigated a recurring critical issue where WP-Admin would become unusable until the /et-cache directory was manually cleared via FTP.
• After extensive trial-and-error testing, identified the root cause as a Divi theme option creating incompatible cached artifacts on Pantheon.
• Disabled the option and stabilized admin access as a long-term fix.
• Managed incremental plugin updates due to the site’s fragility—testing updates individually, validating functionality, and deploying safely to avoid regressions.
• Documented every step, test result, and discovery for the next developer, providing a clear roadmap of what worked, what didn’t, and where further optimization could continue.

Impact

• Improved page performance scores across core templates and high-traffic pages.
• Stabilized the site’s WP-Admin environment by eliminating a long-standing caching bug that previously required manual intervention.
• Reduced image payload sizes and database clutter, contributing to faster load times and cleaner infrastructure.
• Enabled smoother ongoing maintenance through careful documentation and safe update procedures.
• Helped the team overcome Divi + Pantheon limitations that had made earlier improvements difficult or unreliable.