Vince: from a site that kept crashing to a Greek wine shop

Vince imports Greek wines and sells them through its website, vince.rs.

They contacted us because the site was not working. A visitor clicks on a wine and gets a 503 error. Then again.

It shares hosting with the Vetmetal site, so first we had to fix both.

Every click went over the memory limit

The hosting plan had 256 MB of memory. A single request to the site used more than that.

The site had 21 plugins. Next to WooCommerce there were Jetpack, Elementor and Elementor Pro, plus the whole bundle from an old theme (ThemeREX, WPBakery, Essential Grid, Revolution Slider), even though that theme had been switched off long ago. (Nobody used them. Nobody had removed them either.)

When the hosting moved to PHP 8.4, the old WPBakery started breaking. That version of Revolution Slider has known security holes.

On the first day, 15 October, we:

• switched off Jetpack and the old theme, and the site started responding again;
• changed the URLs from “?p=123” to readable ones (/vino/wine-name/);
• cleared junk off the hosting: old copies of plugins and themes, a forgotten backup, 81 log files;
• sent the hosting company a ticket with data on memory use and on Bing being blocked at the server.

On the second day we rebuilt the site on Bricks, with the same look, and moved it over with a clean database. Of the 21 plugins, one remained: WooCommerce. We checked all 91 URLs: they all work, without a single PHP error.

Then a new wine shop

Once the site stopped crashing, we agreed on a new look. Navy, gold and paper, like the label of a good wine.

Most people know little about Greek wines. Malagousia, Assyrtiko, Vinsanto: the buyer reads the name and does not know what to expect. So next to the wines we added what a clerk in a wine shop would tell them:

• a short description of each grape variety, both on the wine page and on the variety page;
• a taste profile on every wine;
• a map of Greece with the wineries, where each point leads to the winery’s page and its wines;
• an “Award-winning” label and icons showing what the wine goes with.

Buying without hold-ups

• A cart at the side of the screen, without reloading the page.
• A business can buy in the company’s name, with its tax ID (PIB) and company registration number.
• Payment on delivery, by card through Halkbank or by bank transfer, with an IPS QR code and payment slip on screen. The card is entered on the bank’s page, so the site never sees the number.
• Wine prices and stock come in automatically from Business Central, the business software where Vince keeps its products, and orders from the site go back into BC. When a wine is out of stock, the site knows it without anyone copying data by hand.
• Search and filters by type of wine.

Check your own site in two minutes

Log in to WordPress and open Plugins. Count the ones you actually use. If the difference is more than three, your site is carrying weight it does not need. (Here the difference was 20.)

If you want someone to look at the rest, send us your URL for a written site check.