A family-owned business overcame years of instability with expert guidance and a true hosting partnership.
Embroidery Legacy, a family-owned embroidery company, faced critical website stability and performance issues that threatened its ability to host educational webinars and run sales events. The site crashed constantly, PHP workers were exhausted, and customer experience suffered.
With the combined expertise of Web Performance Engineer Mike Andreasen from WP Bullet and the dedicated support at BigScoots hosting, we uncovered the root cause of the issue. It was an unexpected CPU model bottleneck on the hosting server. After extensive performance troubleshooting with New Relic, upgrading the hardware finally helped achieve unprecedented stability, handling more than 1,600 concurrent users without issue. This was a huge increase from the crashes and instability at 200 concurrent users.
Embroidery Legacy’s Struggle
Embroidery Legacy, a family-owned business with roots stretching back to 1958, has built a loyal customer base by offering embroidery tutorials, software, and a vast catalog of digital designs. With more than 30,000 designs available online, the company relies heavily on their membership site as a virtual storefront. But for years, the site struggled to handle the demands of its growing audience.
“Our site just kept crashing. We’d see login times take up to five minutes, and even something as simple as a customer scrolling to page two of our catalog could take 60 seconds. It had been six years in a row or so that our site crashed on Black Friday.”
– Jesse Deer, Marketing Director at Embroidery Legacy
The impact went beyond inconvenience. Slow load times, checkout failures, and repeated crashes meant lost sales, a flood of frustrated support tickets, and poor first impressions with new customers.
“When you’re running ads, a lot of your traffic is cold,” Jesse said. “So if someone lands on your site excited to buy something and the website crashes, it is the worst way to start a relationship.”
Despite their loyal following, the Embroidery Legacy team knew the situation was unsustainable.
“At the end of the day, we’re still a small family business,” Jesse said. “Our virtual storefront just wasn’t able to handle the capacity of customers coming through the door.”
The family tried working with other providers, but nothing stuck.
“We were with a different company, and they were not fantastic,” Jesse said. After repeated failures, they began searching for outside expertise and connected with Mike from WP Bullet.
With assistance from members of the team at Wisdm Labs, Mike was able to make a quick diagnosis that turned out to be a turning point.
“He was like a firefighter. He ripped us out of the burning building,” Jesse said.
Within a week, Mike identified core issues and recommended migrating to BigScoots to enable deeper diagnostics and better performance. For the first time in years, Jesse’s family had hope that its digital storefront could keep up.
The Consultant’s Intervention
When Embroidery Legacy first reached out to Mike, their website was in real trouble.
“They were running out of PHP workers, the site was crashing, and they knew it was costing them sales,” Mike said. “Support tickets were piling up, and customers were complaining on Facebook. It was bad for business.”
Mike’s first move was to migrate the site to BigScoots, a host he describes as one of his “secret weapons.” The migration brought some relief, but underlying problems persisted.
“They were happy things got better, but as soon as they ran another sale, the site still wasn’t where it needed to be,” Mike said. “They asked me to help figure out why.”
Using New Relic, Mike uncovered inefficiencies in the site’s membership plugin, theme, and even unpaginated wishlists that created massive database queries.
“You can picture these older ladies adding dozens of embroidery patterns to their wishlists,” Mike said. “Because it wasn’t paginated, it turned into one huge query. That was a major bottleneck.”
The process quickly became what Mike called a game of “whack-a-mole.” Fixes revealed new issues, regressions crept back in when plugin developers rolled back experimental changes, and the client had to delay a planned site redesign. Still, the Embroidery Legacy team remained optimistic and open to trying anything to improve the site.
“This family was determined,” Mike said. “They were willing to do whatever it took.”
Mike guided them through a complete rebuild, recommending lightweight tools like GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks, and helped supervise ongoing load testing with Apache JMeter.
“Their goal was to handle 1,600-plus concurrent users because webinars were a big part of their business,” Mike said. “We kept testing, tweaking, and uncovering more issues along the way.”
Then came the breakthrough. After cloning the site to AWS for comparison, the client noticed the crashes didn’t occur there, despite identical software configurations. That discovery pointed to the hardware itself.
“They started digging into RAM models, CPU models, even hard drive types. And finally, we realized it was the CPU. I’ve been doing this for over seven years, and this was the first time I’d seen a specific CPU model become the bottleneck.”
– Mike Andreasen, Web Performance Engineer at WP Bullet
The team worked closely with BigScoots to test the site on upgraded hardware. The results were immediate.
“It just worked,” Mike said. “All that instability disappeared once the CPU was swapped.”
The new optimized hardware increased the efficiency of peak RAM usage by more than 70% that of the previous hardware, while serving more than eight times the number of users.
“Previously, their hardware was peaking at a point of degradation,” said Mike. “Because the new hardware CPU can perform calculations much faster, they are only using a little more than a fourth of the node’s capacity, ensuring their online transactions are faster and more reliable for business continuity.”
Mike said the experience underscored the importance of persistence and holistic problem-solving.
“Sometimes switching hosts gets you 80% of the way there, but performance is never just one thing,” he said. “The lesson here is don’t give up. Keep turning over stones until you find the real cause.”
How BigScoots Helped Restore Trust
Moving to BigScoots was more than just a change of servers for Embroidery Legacy. It was a turning point in restoring stability and trust in their digital storefront.
BigScoots immediately embraced the partnership. The migration was seamless, with the hosting team handling the heavy lifting so Embroidery Legacy’s small in-house web team didn’t face additional burdens.
“Your support team is just top-notch,” Jesse said of BigScoots. “You helped us install everything, moved the server over without my web team having to do a ton of back work, and you’ve been there 24/7 ever since.”
That level of responsiveness proved invaluable to Jesse and his team, who even had the BigScoots team on standby during relaunch in case something happened.
“For us, after 18 months of building a new site, it felt like we were restarting our business. Having someone prioritize us like that gave us so much confidence.”
– Jesse Deer, Marketing Director at Embroidery Legacy
BigScoots’ flexibility also set them apart. When Mike and the Embroidery Legacy team discovered that the specific CPU model on the hosting server was the real bottleneck, BigScoots didn’t hesitate to dig in. They sourced and deployed new hardware, which is something most cloud-based hosts simply won’t do.
“Most providers will fit you into their boxes, but BigScoots was willing to think outside of them,” Jesse said. “That made all the difference.”
Embroidery Legacy Today
The partnership between Embroidery Legacy, Mike, and BigScoots transformed the business’ digital performance. The Embroidery Legacy site now handles more than 1,600 concurrent users during webinars and major sales events without issue. Average page processing times improved by nearly 95%, dropping response times from 15 seconds to 800 milliseconds. Server resources also now provide a smooth, reliable experience.
The business felt the change most drastically on Black Friday when the site stayed online for the first time in about six years.
“We were just so stoked about it. We made money, and we celebrated the fact that we didn’t have angry customers writing in. It was nice to be able to deliver the top-tier experience our amazing customers deserve, finally.”
– Jesse Deer, Marketing Director at Embroidery Legacy
The improved stability also gave Embroidery Legacy the confidence to move forward with launching their redesigned website. What had once been a fragile, unreliable storefront was rebuilt into a strong foundation for immediate revenue growth and long-term scalability.
Lessons From Embroidery Legacy
The Embroidery Legacy case underscores a critical truth for online businesses. Persistent performance issues are rarely solved with quick fixes. For years, the company endured site crashes, long load times, and lost sales during their most important events. Through perseverance, expert guidance, and a willingness to test every possible solution, they were able to uncover and repair the root cause of the site’s issues.
Mike’s methodical diagnostics and BigScoots’ flexibility to provide custom hardware created an ideal solution that resulted in faster processing times, the ability to serve thousands of concurrent users, and, perhaps most importantly, the stoppage of site crashes.
For businesses, the lesson is clear. Don’t settle for “good enough” when your website is central to revenue and reputation. Invest in partners who care about outcomes, not just contracts.
For developers and agencies, this case highlights the importance of thorough diagnostics and the reminder that even hardware can be the hidden culprit.
And for hosting providers, it’s proof that going beyond cookie-cutter solutions and offering true partnership can set you apart in a crowded market.
In the end, Embroidery Legacy restored confidence in their digital storefront, strengthened trust with their customers, and positioned themselves for long-term growth.
“For years, we struggled with our site crashing during every big event. Mike’s expertise and BigScoots’ willingness to go above and beyond finally gave us the stability we needed. We can now run webinars and sales confidently.”
— Jesse, Marketing Director, Embroidery Legacy
About the Collaborators
Mike Andreasen – WP Bullet
Mike Andreasen, WP Bullet CEO, specializes in deep diagnostics and optimization for high-traffic WordPress sites. Mike, who has almost two decades of experience, is known for solving complex performance challenges and scaling issues that others miss.
