Financial Services
From 8-Second Load Times to Sub-Second Performance
A payment processing platform on six-year-old infrastructure was costing £12,000 per outage. We rebuilt it from the database layer up. No unplanned downtime since.
What We Were Solving
The client operated a payment processing platform on a legacy PHP 5.6 codebase with no architectural standards. Page load times averaged 8 seconds and the checkout flow had a 34% abandonment rate. The MySQL database had grown to 14 million rows with zero indexing strategy. Two previous rebuild attempts by internal teams were abandoned due to scope creep. Traffic spikes during promotional periods caused cascading failures costing an estimated 12,000 GBP per incident.
Our Strategic Approach
We conducted a two-week technical audit mapping every bottleneck before writing a single line of code. The rebuild used a modular PHP 8.3 architecture with strict typing. A complete query optimisation pass across 240+ queries dropped average query time by 94 percent. Redis caching handled high-frequency reads and session management. The payment flow was redesigned from five steps to three. We load-tested to 10x peak volume and ran a zero-downtime migration.
Deliverables
- Full PHP 8.3 platform rebuild with modular MVC architecture
- MySQL 8 query optimisation across 240+ queries with 94% avg reduction
- Redis caching layer for session management and high-frequency reads
- CDN pipeline for static assets with 12-month cache headers
- Redesigned 3-step checkout with abandoned flow recovery
- Load-tested infrastructure supporting 500K+ daily transactions
- Role-based admin panel with real-time transaction monitoring
- Automated daily backups with point-in-time recovery
Project Timeline
Audit and Architecture
Full code audit, database schema analysis, performance profiling and new architecture design.
Core Platform Rebuild
Modular PHP 8.3 codebase, database restructure with comprehensive indexing, Redis caching layer.
Payment Flow and Frontend
Conversion-optimised checkout rebuild, CDN integration and frontend performance targeting sub-1s load.
Testing and Migration
Full regression testing, load simulation to 500K daily transactions, security audit and zero-downtime deployment.
Measurable Results
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