Supporting e-commerce growth without letting technology become a constraint.

PLATEFORMS has supported this specialist paragliding retailer for 15 years, almost since the company began.

At the start, the need was relatively straightforward: an online store that could support the growth of the business while keeping investment under control. PrestaShop met the need and an initial platform was implemented.

Over the years, the business grew. So did the website.

New modules, new features and different contributors were progressively added. Investment remained focused for a long time on immediate commercial and marketing needs, while the platform continued to evolve step by step.

This approach supported the company's growth for many years. But technical debt gradually accumulated.

As sales and traffic increased, the platform's limitations became increasingly visible.

Difficult upgrades, module incompatibilities, unexpected catalogue behaviour and performance issues made the application increasingly fragile and future changes progressively more risky.

Before considering a complete rebuild, PLATEFORMS looked for reasonable ways to extend the life of the existing platform.

Resources were increased, the database was separated from the application layer and the architecture was progressively strengthened to handle more traffic.

Then waves of attacks began regularly disrupting access to the website.

An additional protection and filtering layer was introduced to keep the store available as far as possible during those events.

After several years, the platform eventually reached a limit.

It had become extremely difficult to maintain and almost impossible to move confidently towards newer versions. At the same time, traffic continued to increase.

Continuing to stack fixes would only have postponed the problem rather than solving it.

The decision was therefore made to rebuild on a clean foundation.

But rebuilding on a clean foundation did not necessarily mean changing technology.

The client's team already knew PrestaShop, it still met the business need and there was no reason to impose a different platform simply for the sake of change.

The rebuild covered both the application and its infrastructure.

A new PrestaShop platform was built on an up-to-date, controlled foundation. The features that were genuinely needed were retained and specific developments were added where the business requirement justified them.

At the same time, the architecture was completely redesigned.

Application, administration and data functions were separated. The platform was designed to distribute load, make future evolution easier and provide far greater visibility into how it operates.

The objective was no longer simply to support current traffic.

The client also wanted the ability to grow beyond France and, over time, operate the store in multiple languages.

The new platform therefore needed enough headroom to support that next stage.

Rebuilding the platform was not enough: the transition also had to be prepared without losing control of day-to-day operations.

Not all historical data needed to be transferred.

The migration scope was deliberately limited to the data required by the new platform, including:

• catalogue
• categories
• customers

Several migration rehearsals were carried out in June 2026 to test the procedures, identify issues and make the final transition more reliable.

The new platform went live in July 2026.

On migration day, the store was first placed in maintenance mode so the team could complete the operational processing of orders already in progress.

The technical cutover then began during the morning:

• data migration
• infrastructure changeover
• DNS changes
• functional checks
• resolution of issues encountered

The work continued until late in the evening.

Rather than reopen the store immediately after a long day of intervention, the project team and the client chose to resume the following morning under better conditions.

The new website opened at 9 a.m.

Further adjustments continued during the following week without preventing the platform from fulfilling its role.

The new architecture was not only intended to perform better. It also needed to be far more observable.

Monitoring, centralised logging, alerting and security tools now provide visibility into the behaviour of the platform, its activity and the events that may affect it.

Since production launch, new traffic peaks and further attacks have been observed.

They were identified, and the protection mechanisms contained them without destabilising the store.

The client directly observed the difference compared with the previous platform.

Today, the platform is operated and maintained by PLATEFORMS.

The rebuild is not treated as the end of the project: monitoring, maintenance, security and ongoing improvements now support the store over time.

On the PLATEFORMS side, two developers, one infrastructure specialist and PLATEFORMS leadership worked in close collaboration with the client.