Where Environmental Research Goes to Spec the Right Instrument

Our Approach

We treated Fondriest’s technical depth as the asset, not the obstacle. Working with their applications engineers, we mapped how buyers actually evaluate instruments by parameter, by application, by brand and by compatibility and built the catalog structure around those real decision paths.

Magento (Adobe Commerce) was the right fit for a catalog this large and technical, and our Magento development team built it for the job: rich, structured datasheets, a compatibility and accessory model so related instruments and consumables surface correctly, and faceted navigation that lets a hydrologist filter to exactly the right logger. To keep expert help close to the decision, we put pre-sales support inline live assistance and clear request-a-quote paths on technical products so a researcher can get an applications engineer’s input without leaving the page. The rental program was given its own journey within the same platform, distinct from outright purchase.

The bot problem we tackled first, because everything else is academic if the site is down. Log analysis showed most of the damage came from a handful of behaviours: aggressive crawlers ignoring robots.txt, scripted login attempts, and scraper traffic pulling entire category trees at speed. We handled it at the edge and at the origin WAF rules, rate limiting and bot-scoring through Cloudflare on the paths that mattered, then PHP-FPM pool tuning, Nginx connection and request limits, fail2ban rules, firewall blocks for the worst offenders, and OS and package updates that had been sitting untouched. Downtime stopped being a weekly conversation.

Performance came next, and this is where the real digging happened. We profiled the front end properly rather than chasing a score: deferred and split the JavaScript bundles, dropped third-party scripts that cost more than they returned, moved non-critical JS out of the render path, and cut DOM work on category pages where the filter logic was re-rendering far more than it needed to. On the back end we went through the custom modules line by line N+1 queries in the compatibility logic, uncached collection loads, layout XML doing work it shouldn’t, observers firing on every page load for no good reason. Redis was reconfigured for full-page and block caching, Elasticsearch queries were tightened, and images moved to WebP with automated resizing. The PageSpeed numbers followed, but what clients actually feel is click-to-render on a filtered category page, and that’s where the gain was biggest.

For the back office, we built a custom ERP rather than bending an off-the-shelf system into shape. Our ERP software development team scoped it around how Fondriest actually works rental cycles, calibration and repair jobs, multi-supplier purchasing, quote-to-order flow and wired it into Magento so inventory, orders and customer records move both ways without anyone re-keying anything. Rentals especially: a unit can be out in the field, back for service, and booked for next season all at once.

The three WordPress properties got their own cleanup pass plugin audit and removal, theme rework, database optimization, caching, image handling and security hardening. Same team, same standards as the store, which matters because these sites feed the store. If you’re weighing similar work, it helps to hire WordPress developers who understand the commerce side too, not just the CMS.

Finally, we tied the brand’s content authority to commerce: the Learning Center, Environmental Monitor articles and field-station data connect to relevant products, so the resources that build trust also guide buyers toward the right equipment. The architecture leaves room to extend B2B account features and managed services the kind of roadmap where it pays to hire dedicated developers who already know the catalog logic rather than re-brief a new team each phase.