Rebuilding a trade ordering portal one route at a time
A building-supplies distributor whose trade customers order through a web portal built on an aging server-side template framework.
- Challenge
- Pages load slowly on the phones contractors use on site, checkout cannot be completed with a keyboard, and every new feature takes longer because layout code is copied from page to page. Freezing feature work for a full rebuild is not an option.
- Approach
- 1Measure real-user performance and audit search, reorder and checkout against WCAG success criteria
- 2Build a component library with the distributor’s designer, with design tokens shared between Figma and code
- 3Expose product, pricing and order data through a thin API over the existing platform
- 4Rebuild the portal in Next.js route by route, with routing rules sending migrated paths to the new app and everything else to the old one
- 5Gate every pull request on performance budgets, axe-core checks and end-to-end tests for checkout
- Outcome
- Contractors can search and reorder from a phone on site without waiting on slow pages, checkout works with a keyboard and a screen reader, and new features are assembled from shared components instead of copied code.
Services involved





