By Ivan Dimitrov, Multi-Platform Practice Lead at Tryzens Global 

The journey toward digital transformation isn’t just about adopting the latest technologies; it’s about building an ecosystem that empowers innovation, resilience, and efficiency.

As brands and retailers rethink their digital foundations, a comprehensive review of your technology stack becomes not only a tactical exercise but a strategic imperative.

As a technology agnostic agency and digital transformation partner, Tryzens Global works with global businesses like Orlebar Brown and R.M.Williams to assess, optimize, and future-proof their technology ecosystems. 

Recently, we helped Orlebar Brown migrate to Shopify and launch the world’s first implementation of Shopify’s multi-entity and multi-currency payout functionality with Markets POS.

We tailor our technology audits to the specific digital commerce platforms under review. Additionally, we leverage a structured framework that provides a comprehensive assessment of your tech stack, ensuring alignment with the strategic objectives of your digital transformation project.

Here are the key areas:

Architecture 

The core of your digital ecosystem lies in the application architecture. We begin by understanding the code architecture, recognizing that each architectural choice – whether it’s monolith, headless or composable – carries implications for scalability, flexibility, and long-term sustainability.

Major customizations

Identify major changes implemented across core systems, frontend and backend, abstraction, dependency injections, etc. Geolocation functionality needs to be reviewed and analyzed to ensure it doesn’t create any unpredicted redirect loops, which prevent customers from accessing the storefront or search engines from crawling the storefront across regions accurately.

In an era where agility defines competitive advantage, it’s important for organizations to evaluate whether custom solutions are functioning as strategic enablers or potential roadblocks. 

Integration ecosystem

Document all APIs and third-party integrations that are used on the website. Make sure they are consistently applied across all environments. This not only reduces the complexity, but decreases your maintenance effort, improves your scalability, and fortifies your digital architecture against unforeseen disruptions.

Storefront performance 

The storefront is what the user interacts with on a daily basis, making your frontend performance essential for both user experience and SEO. To measure it, leverage industry-leading tools like GTmetrix, Catchpoint’s WebPage Test, and Google’s PageSpeed Insights. These tools provide insights into crucial factors such as load times, visual stability, and responsiveness across devices.

The goal is simple: to create a fast, seamless, and engaging experience that meets the demands of today’s mobile-first consumers. 

Optimizing 

Focus on optimizing page load speed, making sure that content appears and becomes interactive as fast as possible, preventing elements shifting unexpectedly, and that the site adapts smoothly to different screen sizes, input methods, and network conditions.

This requires measuring and fine-tuning the page load times, cumulative layout shift, and script execution time. It includes splitting scripts and CSS code on a component basis, avoiding loading them for components that aren’t available on the specific page.

Additionally, improve image sizes by avoiding large files, using efficient formats, and lazy loading techniques. Today, every millisecond counts.

Accessibility and usability 

Design should be aligned with all users in mind. This includes the positioning of elements, colors, and coding standards that adhere to the WCAG requirements. An inclusive digital strategy is one that recognizes the diverse needs of its audience. There are tools that you can use to analyze your website, such as Wave and Deque Systems’ Axe.

Review the site and identify which areas have issues. Create a list that summarizes the key points where improvements should be made. This covers a wide range from navigational challenges to content accessibility. The insights you gather will not only improve usability but also will reinforce your commitment to an inclusive digital experience.

Crafting intuitive journeys

Examine the entire user journey: from initial engagement to the browsing experience, the checkout journey, and the post-purchase experience.

Look for friction points in your interface and interactions. Imagine how each element can be refined to create a more intuitive and smoother user experience.

Site setup 

A well-configured digital environment is one where every system component works seamlessly. 

Review your caching strategies to enhance speed and reduce server load, ensuring that all scheduled tasks and workflows are well optimized. The efficiency of these backend processes is crucial for maintaining high storefront performance; even if the frontend is fine-tuned, if your backend has bottlenecks, your site will be less responsive and reliable.

Scrutinize the configuration of your backend services and APIs. Evaluate settings like timeouts, rate limits, and circuit breakers. And ensure that your SSL implementations and security certificates are up to date. You don’t want to affect the stability and reliability of your digital environment.

Robust logging and monitoring practices will further empower you to preempt and address potential issues before they impact the user experience.

Code audit 

Conducting a thorough code audit identifies performance bottlenecks as well as laying the groundwork for future improvements and innovations. Focus on critical pathways within your codebase and assess their performance under real-world conditions.

Review key controllers and check their performance and cache usage. These typically include the homepage, search, product and basket pages, and URL redirects.

Follow the best practices that impact performance and scalability, identifying optimization opportunities like improving the cache, reducing the loops, fixing deprecated API usage, and reducing the errors due to code implementation issues.

Security audit 

Cyber and data risks pose the most significant threats to retailers today, demanding a comprehensive, proactive security strategy. To effectively safeguard your digital assets, implement technical countermeasures against client-side vulnerabilities like clickjacking and cross-site scripting through robust security headers and input sanitization.

Beyond that, evaluate your authentication practices and access controls. Ensure that multi-factor authentication, role-based access, and vigilant logging practices are in place to protect sensitive data. Enable automated alerting to detect suspicious activities. These measures create multiple security layers that protect sensitive customer and business data.

The blueprints for digital transformation 

You can’t future-proof your digital commerce operations if your architecture isn’t built for scalability. Your business must be able to evolve with customer expectations, emerging technologies, and market trends.

By assessing your tech stack, you lay the foundation for a digital ecosystem that is not only efficient and secure but also poised for future growth.

This framework is a strategic blueprint to drive transformation, foster innovation, and lead your brand into a future of exciting possibilities in digital commerce.

To help you with the first steps of your digital transformation journey, we’ve created a Tech Stack Assessment Checklist, a practical tool to guide your evaluation.