Magento 2 relaunch: theme, caching and releases
A full relaunch of one of the Floor Giants stores on a new theme, and what traffic and bounce rate did afterwards.
The old store
When I joined Floor Giants in March 2025 one of the stores was overdue a relaunch. The old theme had a lot of overrides and the main templates did not render the same way twice. Nobody owned the release. Changes went live when someone had a spare hour to push them, and if a page broke there was no rehearsed way to get the old one back.
The decision
I decided to do the whole thing as one relaunch on a custom theme. I set the plan, broke it into milestones and took the final say on when each one went live. Before each milestone we wrote down what to click and who was checking it, and we practised the rollback before each one.
What the team changed
The team built the theme and went through the caching behind it, because the old templates were punching holes in the full page cache on the pages that mattered most. They cleaned up the rendering path on category and product pages and put the store on Deployer so a release is one command and a rollback is one more.
What happened after launch
After the relaunch traffic was up 31%, bounce rate was down 40% and engagement was up 35% against the period before. Some of that is the site being faster and some of it is the trading calendar, and I have not tried to separate the two. What I would do differently is start the release checks earlier. We wrote them during the relaunch, under pressure. Automated CI and testing are now in place across the stores.
Related reading
- Magento 2 security patching workflow
- Magento 2 checkout: LCP from 5.8s to 1.6s
- How to investigate a slow Magento 2 checkout
- Hyvä migration planning and backend architecture
If you have a Magento setup with a similar problem, get in touch.