Fixing the Two Things That Quietly Cost a Store Money

Distillata delivers bottled water and coffee service across Northeast Ohio, running a full WooCommerce store on a custom DevQ theme with local delivery, national shipping, and four payment gateways. Two problems were costing the store money in ways that were hard to see from the outside.

Search was returning nothing. The third-party search plugin had been configured to exclude out-of-stock products and to skip pages, posts, SKUs, and product attributes. On a store where products routinely go out of stock, that meant customers searching for a product they had bought before were told it did not exist.

Every visitor was bypassing the CDN. The canonical domain pointed at a legacy direct-origin IP left over from an older hosting configuration. Because the apex was canonical and www redirected to it, effectively all traffic hit the origin server directly. Varnish never cached a single page of HTML, so every pageview executed PHP.

For search, we replaced the third-party plugin with a purpose-built one. It maintains its own index across products, pages, and posts, rebuilds automatically on save and on stock change, and includes client-editable synonyms and blocked terms so the team can tune results without a developer. It registers the same shortcode the old plugin used, so no theme changes were needed and the old plugin could stay installed and deactivated as a one-click rollback.

For performance, we traced the traffic path and repointed the apex domain to WP Engine’s edge, matching the configuration the other domains on the install already used. We deliberately left Cloudflare unproxied in front of it, because double-proxying would mask real visitor IPs and break fraud screening on the payment gateway.

Alongside both, the store runs custom shipping logic — a plugin that decides when to show live USPS rates based on what is actually in the cart, so local delivery customers never see national shipping options they cannot use.

Search now returns results for in-stock and out-of-stock products, and for content pages, with the team able to add synonyms themselves when they notice a term customers use that the catalog does not.

The DNS fix moved the site from serving 99.6% of its bandwidth from origin to serving cached HTML from the edge for the first time. Before the change the site was the single largest origin consumer across ninety environments on the hosting account, with the account’s worst cache hit ratio and roughly 70% higher average latency than a typical site. Cart, checkout, and account pages remain deliberately uncached.