How Urumi Increased grüum's User Satisfaction Rate by 294%
The Context
When Urumi engaged with grüum.com, the team wanted to resolve performance instability that was directly affecting customer experience. Cached LCP would climb to 5-7 seconds, and intermittent cold starts could take up to ~40 seconds.
"I'm very happy with the results," says George, founder of grüum. "The biggest performance improvements we've seen from you guys."
The Shift
Urumi worked directly with George and the grüum team to identify root causes across caching, server configuration, and application hot paths. The focus was on fixing both the "everyday" slow paths and the unpredictable extremes that make a site feel unreliable.
From this work, grüum saw a shift around:
- Cloudflare + caching misconfigurations were identified and fixed
- Performance hot paths were identified and fixed, with a patch provided to the WooCommerce Product Bundles team
- Server configuration was optimized so workers could use the available infra more effectively
- Latency-inducing N+1 query issues were fixed (traces went to almost 0 post-deploy)
- Cold starts caused by unoptimized PHP worker config were eliminated
The grüum team immediately saw the difference. Cached requests went from 4s to 0.3s. Uncached requests dropped from 5.7s to 2.7s.
The Outcomes
After Urumi's changes were deployed, grüum's New Relic data showed ~294% improvement in % satisfied users.
The grüum team validated the improvements with stress tests mimicking real user journeys (browse, login, add to cart, order):
- Average response time: 740ms with p95 at 3.03s
- Stress testing: Avg 770.09ms, Median 314.14ms, P90 1620ms
- Peak throughput: 358.49 req/s (uncached), p90 under ~2s at 300 VU
They went from customers abandoning checkout due to timeouts to completing orders without friction.
What's Next
Our engagement with grüum is ongoing for further optimization to improve performance and stability. We also ran a GCP POC vs their current Hetzner setup, which brought P99 to <900ms (uncached) and showed improvements like avg 740ms → 378ms and p95 3.03s → 1.27s.
"The results speak for themselves — I'm really happy we worked with Urumi," says George, founder of grüum.
Key Results
- 294% improvement in user satisfaction
- 4s → 0.3s cached response time
- 5.7s → 2.7s uncached response time
- 358 req/s peak throughput (uncached)
- Checkout fixed — no more abandoned orders from timeouts
Built by ex-WooCommerce core developers
We're ex-WooCommerce core developers and ex-Google/Meta engineers who've scaled systems handling millions of requests per minute. We built the parts of WooCommerce that matter in production: performance, payments, and reliability. That's why we can operate your store end-to-end, not just host it.