AKSU
From 41 to 98: getting AKSU off a server under attack
A slow WordPress site shared a server with the company's own internal sales system, and when traffic spiked, the sales system crashed. The rebuild in Astro was not just a speed upgrade, it isolated the business from fragile shared infrastructure.
The starting point
AKSU's site (aksuglobal.com) ran on WordPress, hosted on a shared GoDaddy VPS with just 4GB of RAM, the same machine that also held two other WordPress sites and the sales management system AKSU's team uses every day. That server took bot attacks constantly, and whenever load spiked, the internal sales system would go down. It was not just a speed problem (mobile performance barely reached 41 out of 100), it was that the public site and a business-critical tool depended on the same fragile infrastructure.
What we did
From there, the work moved on several fronts at once:
A full rebuild in Astro and React, migrated to Vercel, to move the public site off the shared server that took bot attacks every day.
While cleaning up that shared server, the risk stopped being hypothetical: we found a disguised remote-access installer and several gigabytes of publicly exposed databases and source code. All of it was moved to safety immediately.
The full catalog, 115 products, migrated to a CMS with real data, no templates or filler content.
A store locator with geolocation, built on a real dataset of 1,970 points of sale nationwide, not a generic list.
Diagnosed and fixed the real performance bottleneck: 13MB of unoptimized images in the main carousel, converted to WebP with smart load priority.
147 redirects to preserve the search rankings the site already had, without losing a single indexed URL.
Contrast and accessibility fixes handled in the same pass, not as an afterthought.
Content enriched so AI actually gets the product right: an AKSU director asked an AI assistant whether their brake fluid was reliable and got a generic, lukewarm answer. The product-line pages were rewritten with real FAQs, official SENCAMER certification, and structured data (product and FAQ JSON-LD), so the information AI consumes is specific and verifiable.
The results
The numbers speak for themselves, but the result that matters most to AKSU is not in any chart: the internal sales system stopped competing for resources with the public site, because they no longer share a server.
Performance
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO
Performance
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO
| Metric | WordPress · Aug 26, 2026 | Astro · Sep 18, 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| First Contentful Paint | 3.0s | 1.4s | −53% |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 8.6s | 2.4s | −72% |
| Total Blocking Time | 850ms | 30ms | −96% |
| Layout shift (CLS) | 0.067 | 0.01 | −85% |
| Speed Index | 10.2s | 1.4s | −86% |
Google PageSpeed Insights, real captures, mobile.
This is not just a lab test: Google's Core Web Vitals, measured from real visitor data on the new site, come back "Passed" (Largest Contentful Paint of 2.1s, zero unexpected layout shifts).
The real cause behind the slowness was not the new architecture, it was image weight. The main carousel was loading 13MB of uncompressed PNGs. Converting them to WebP, prioritizing the first image, and deferring everything non-essential brought real load time down from 8.1 to 1.7 seconds in the span of a single day of work. Diagnose before promising, instead of assuming "faster" comes automatically with a new tech stack. The same standard applied to the final step of the migration: the domain cutover was coordinated with AKSU's systems team and only happened once their sales system was running independently, and that same day we caught and fixed, before anyone noticed, that the company's email depended on an outdated mechanism with no MX record of its own, one that would have broken the moment the DNS changed.
As the CEO of AKSU put it: "We hired GixLabs for our digital strategy, and the results exceeded our expectations. Their technical knowledge and attention to detail make the difference."
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