Building a High-Performance Web Platform with Astro and Jahia
The Challenge
RetailNow's legacy monolithic CMS was delivering Core Web Vitals scores in the bottom quartile for their industry, directly impacting SEO rankings and conversion rates. Their development team had no ability to adopt modern front-end tooling without a full platform replacement.
Our Solution
We decoupled the front-end from the CMS by adopting a headless delivery model with Astro as the rendering layer. Content editors continued working in the familiar CMS interface while developers gained full control of the presentation layer. Astro's island architecture ensured only interactive components shipped JavaScript.
Results
Largest Contentful Paint improved from 4.2s to 0.9s. The site achieved a 98 Lighthouse performance score on mobile. Organic search traffic grew 34% in the first three months post-launch, and the development team reduced their average feature delivery time by half.