Lightning Fast Magento 2 Redesign for an aftermarket wheels Company
Lightning Fast
Compared to your typical Magento 2 website the new Element Wheels website built with Lightning uses a headless frontend built with AI for improved performance and reduced development cost.
Element Wheels is a premium aftermarket wheel and tire retailer serving customers across the United States — offering guaranteed fitment packages for luxury, sport, and off-road vehicles spanning 40+ makes, from Acura and Audi to Tesla, Rolls-Royce, and beyond. Their catalog runs to 80,000+ SKUs, with complex vehicle fitment data, stagger-pair configurations, and advanced filtering requirements.
As a partner Cadence Labs has worked with Element Wheels since 2017 when they approached us for an audit of their original Magento 1 website. Since then our team has helped support them with a variety of projects including an upgrade to Magento 2, development of custom fitment logic, implementation of Bolt for checkout, and most recently an AI powered redesign of their Magento 2 website.
From This…
…To This!
The existing Magento 2 storefront was failing Google’s Core Web Vitals on mobile, with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) hovering around 3.5 seconds — well above the 2.5-second threshold for a “Good” rating. The fitment experience was cumbersome, the gallery lacked visual impact, and deployment required maintenance windows that interrupted users.
Cadence Labs rebuilt the customer-facing storefront using Lightning — a proprietary decoupled architecture built on Laravel 12 and React 19 — while keeping the existing Magento 2 backend fully intact. No data migration. No re-platforming. No lost integrations.
The result: a 1.2-second LCP on mobile, a pass on all Core Web Vitals, near-real-time search indexing, zero-downtime deployments, and a gallery experience that converts inspiration into purchase. You can see some early screen shots of these results below.
Google isn’t the only judge, just read this review from our client:
Project Highlights
On Site Search
Speed is only half the search problem. The other half is relevance, does the search engine actually understand what a customer is looking for? On the old Magento storefront searching “Ferrada silver wheels” took six seconds and returned 60,238 results, with a bronze wheel appearing as the second result. The search engine matched the words, but completely missed the intent. On the new storefront, the same query returns in under a second with 21 results — every one of them a Ferrada wheel in a silver finish.
Take a look at the videos below comparing the search for “Ferrada silver wheels”.
Search Speed Comparison
Both recordings play simultaneously — watch how much faster the new search is
Fast Pageloads
Magento 2 uses Elasticsearch through an adapter layer that reloads every search result back into MySQL before rendering. This round-trip is the core bottleneck for page speed. For a catalogue with 80,000+ products and complex data relationships, it adds hundreds of milliseconds to every listing page request. Lightning eliminates this entirely.
Zero Downtime Deployments
Every deployment to the Lightning stack is a blue/green deployment on AWS infrastructure. A new release is built alongside the running production environment, traffic is atomically switched from old to new, and the previous release remains available for instant rollback. No maintenance mode. No 503 pages. No “we’ll be right back” screens.
Vehicle-First Navigation
The redesigned site leads with a vehicle selector throughout the shopping experience. Customers choose their make first — from a comprehensive list spanning 40+ manufacturers — and the catalogue is filtered to show only wheels with confirmed fitment for that specific vehicle. The Elasticsearch index stores vehicle-specific fitment compatibility directly in each product document, meaning filtration happens at query time with no additional database lookups.
Additionally we built in logic to determine when a vehicle should be preselected for a user. This way a user sees the items that are applicable to their car and not just a wide assortment of wheels that may or may not fit.
Cart and Checkout
When a customer adds a set of wheels to their cart, they are prompted to add matching tires with options pre-filtered to sizes compatible with their chosen wheels and vehicle. From there, the site presents a strongly recommended package of installation essentials: lug kits and tire pressure monitoring sensors (TPMS) specific to their vehicle and wheel combination.
Magento’s native checkout is notoriously slow. The redesign replaced it with a single-page checkout experience that keeps the customer in one place from cart review through to order confirmation, eliminating the page transitions and reload delays that cause abandonment.
New Wheels Gallery
The gallery was one of the most significant front-end improvements of the redesign. It serves three purposes: First improving SEO by expanding the site with vehicle and wheel specific content. Second, inspiring customers with the aesthetic possibilities of upgrading. Third, building confidence by showing real builds on real cars — eliminating the guesswork of “how will this actually look on my vehicle?”
Fitment Data Engine
A proprietary data set validates fitment for every wheel-vehicle combination, accounting for the complex variables that determine whether a wheel will truly fit. When a customer sees a wheel listed for their vehicle, the fit is guaranteed. This is backed by the speed of the Lightning stack — because fitment queries are resolved directly in Elasticsearch rather than through MySQL joins across EAV tables, filtering a 80,000-SKU catalogue by vehicle compatibility is near-instantaneous.
The Element Wheels redesign demonstrates what’s possible when a performance-first architecture meets a product that demands technical precision. By decoupling the storefront from Magento’s rendering pipeline — not by replacing Magento, but by building around it — Cadence Labs delivered a 66% reduction in LCP, a pass on all Core Web Vitals, near-real-time search indexing, and a gallery experience that converts inspiration into purchase.
The smart search engine transforms the discovery experience — from a slow, intent-blind keyword matcher to a sub-second engine that understands brands, vehicle names, part numbers, and dimensions, and groups results in a way that mirrors how customers actually shop for wheels.
The cart and checkout experience completes the picture — guiding customers from a single wheel selection to a complete, install-ready package, then through a fast, frictionless checkout powered by Bolt. Every part of the journey has been rebuilt around customer confidence and conversion.
The result is a platform worthy of the premium products it sells: fast, trustworthy, visually compelling, and built for the enthusiast who doesn’t compromise.
Interested In Working with Cadence Labs?
Cadence Labs is an eCommerce development agency based in Boulder, Colorado. with a focus on Adobe Commerce, Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce.
