Full Website Revamp for Wakeboard Boats Buying & Selling Platform

This online platform is quite popular for buying and selling wakeboard boats and accessories. Originally built on WordPress, the site had grown over time but so had its technical issues.

The client was dealing with:

• Frequent site crashes

• Plugin conflicts

• Limited design flexibility

• Major trouble integrating with Shopify

It was clear they had outgrown WordPress and needed a more robust, scalable platform to support their growing business.

Objective

The mission was simple but ambitious: Rebuild the entire site on Kentico Xperience, a more stable and enterprise-grade CMS, with: Seamless Shopify integration Better media and product management A modern, secure, and scalable infrastructure

Key Challenges & Solutions

Media Migration & Data Integration Challenges During Platform Transformation

1. Migrating 275+ GB of Media Assets from Legacy WordPress to Azure

Problem:
The legacy WordPress site housed over 275 GB of boat listing images. The size and complexity of data posed a significant challenge in terms of extraction and cloud migration.

Resolution:
Our team developed a robust PowerShell script that systematically fetched and uploaded the entire media library to Azure Blob Storage. The logic accounted for authentication, chunking large file transfers, and preserving directory structures.

2. Integrating Azure Media Assets into Kentico Xperience

Problem:
Once migrated, the next hurdle was integrating the large image set into the Kentico Xperience CMS without manual uploads or data duplication.

Resolution:
We developed a custom integration layer within Kentico to link images stored on Azure directly into the Kentico media library. This ensured performance optimization and storage scalability while maintaining clean media referencing in content objects.

3. Maintaining Correct Image Order for Product Listings

Problem:
Each boat listing had multiple images (e.g., 13+ per boat) that needed to appear in a specific sequence. This order information was not inherently preserved in WordPress exports.

Resolution:
Our developers built a .NET Core console application that fetched metadata from the original WordPress database, including image ordering. The script parsed and injected the image order data into the new Kentico database, ensuring that images appeared correctly in front-end galleries.

4. Filtering Out Redundant Thumbnails & Resolving Filename Casing Issues

Problem:
WordPress automatically generates multiple thumbnail versions for every image. These unwanted versions significantly bloated the data transfer to Azure. Additionally, discrepancies in filename casing (e.g., Boat1.jpg vs. boat1.jpg) caused media referencing errors in Kentico.

Resolution:
A second PowerShell script was authored to:

• Detect and exclude WordPress-generated thumbnails during migration.

• Normalize filename casing and replace upper-case references where necessary. This cleanup ensured that only usable, correctly referenced media was ingested into Kentico.

5. Shopify API Limit – Product Fetching (250 items per call)

Problem:
Shopify's REST API restricts product fetching to a maximum of 250 items per API call, while our client had 1,000+ products. This made it inefficient and impractical to fetch the entire product catalog in one go.

Resolution:
Our development team implemented a custom pagination-based logic within Kentico to make multiple concurrent API calls, aggregate results, and store them in Kentico efficiently. This seamless integration eliminated the 250-item limit.

 DotStark has been an incredible support partner during our complete website rebuild on the XbyK platform. Their team was consistently available, going above and beyond even working late nights and long hours to help us meet critical deadlines. Communication was excellent, and the pricing was very reasonable. A special thanks to Starkmates, who was always responsive and ready to assist, no matter the hour. I truly appreciate the dedication and would gladly work with him again. 

6. Missing Product Association on Post-Purchase Redirect

Problem:
After a user completed a purchase on Shopify, they were redirected to a Kentico-hosted "Thank You" page. However, the backend could not identify which product or plan the user had purchased, leading to issues in personalization and data logging.

Resolution:
Our team implemented a solution using GraphQL and WebHooks, passing mandatory custom parameters (e.g., Member ID and Boat ID) during checkout. These identifiers enabled accurate tracking of the purchased plan and its associated products.

Result: This provided clarity on user purchases and helped maintain a synchronized state between Shopify and Kentico systems.