The Story

Chuttingstar – the largest skydiving gear retailer

What started as an individual parachute rigger packing parachutes in an apartment in 1999 has grown to become the largest skydiving gear retailer backed by the most extensive expert advice blog in the world. ChutingStar is owned and operated by Mike Gruwell and his wife Stephanie. This unique, family business is now a blend of parachute rigging, skydiving gear sales, a skydiving expert advice blog, a walk-in skydiving gear store, an online skydiving gear retailer, and FAA Senior & Master Parachute Rigger School.

The Challenges

ChutingStar moved its eCommerce business to Magento Commerce after eight years of success with Magento Open Source. With the enhanced features of Magento Commerce, Chuting Star created a new template that captured the quality and excitement of their family business. As they neared the site launch, however, there were a few hurdles they needed to jump through before they could go live. These included dropping the page loads from 10 seconds to 2 seconds, implementing the latest Magento patches, and configuring Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) throughout the page to work with Full Page Caching (FPC).

The Objective

Optimize eCommerce website loading time, enhance website security and boost the performance of the website

The Solutions 

Migrated data to Variux development server

With the holidays soon approaching, Variux quickly worked through the hurdles to ensure ChutingStar was able to launch its site in time. We migrated their data to our development server, taking 2 seconds off the page loads. We reviewed the error_log as well, which revealed missing resources that were stalling the server response time, cutting another 4 seconds on page loads.

Note: A development server is a type of server that is designed to facilitate the development and testing of programs, websites, software, or applications for software programmers. It provides a run-time environment, as well as all hardware/software utilities that are essential to program debugging and development.

Solve security vulnerabilities and fix the issue with SSL and FPC

We updated its current eCommerce version to the latest Magento release to solve known security vulnerabilities and fix the issue with SSL and FPC. Then we implemented FPC, giving us the performance boost needed to go live.

The Results

The new site launch was an exciting milestone and marked the beginning of a successful shopping season for ChutingStar. 

• To their customers, we enhance their experience by dropping the chuttingstar.com page load time by 6 seconds. 
• To ChuttingStar’s business, we were able to help them save over $100,000 a year, which was able to be reinvested into their business for continued growth.