Shopware 6 relaunch in record time. Smart home lighting relies on maxcluster hosting

Mothership implemented the agency project Smart Home Lighting and supported the implementation of the online shop—from the technical infrastructure to the brand presentation. The complete relaunch was delivered in under six weeks. Thanks to maxcluster’s hosting, specially optimized for Shopware 6, a high-performance, fail-safe infrastructure could be provided, which contributed significantly to the shop’s stability and speed 

The result: a technically sophisticated e-commerce presence that was designed for growth, scalability, and performance from the very start.

Smart Home Beleuchtung is an online shop focused on lighting and home automation. The range includes high-quality, aesthetically sophisticated products from premium manufacturers around the world.
For the agency project Smart Home Beleuchtung the shop was completely rebuilt—from concept to a successful go-live—and continues to be further developed as part of the project.

Challenges: time and structure

At the start of the project, there was neither a technical infrastructure nor a foundation on which a modern online shop could have been built. The shop had to be developed entirely from scratch—within less than six weeks.

This initial situation meant maximum freedom in design and technology, but at the same time confronted the team with the task of precisely coordinating all strategic, conceptual, and technical steps under intense time pressure 

Key project requirements 

The main challenges lay in three areas:

• Setting up a functional project setup and an agile, cost-efficient development process that enabled rapid progress while maintaining high quality.
• Developing a consistent brand identity (CD) and user experience (UX) based on a predefined design—with a focus on intuitive user guidance and visual clarity.
• Integrating a central PIM system for efficient, scalable management of product data as well as for automating data import  

On this basis, Mothership developed an overall technical and design concept that made implementation within the tight timeframe feasible.

To achieve the goals that had been set, a complete relaunch was implemented with Shopware 6 Community Edition on the proverbial “greenfield site” — in less than six weeks.

1. System selection & setup
   After analyzing the requirements, the Mothership team chose Shopware 6 CE. Compared with the quickly implemented but limited Shopify option, Shopware offered long-term flexibility and extensibility. An agile development process ensured that a functional base release was created early on and then expanded iteratively.
2. Frontend & UX design
   Based on an existing CD/UX draft, a responsive frontend was created with clear user guidance and structured product presentation — optimized for all devices.
3. Content & SEO
   Via an interface to the headless CMS Strapi, content could be maintained efficiently and blog posts managed. With the help of semi-automated AI tools, extensive, search-engine-optimized product and category texts were created within just a few days.
4. PIM integration & data management
   Akeneo was implemented as the PIM system. Product families and variants enabled heterogeneous items to be represented precisely. JSON objects extended the standard functionality, automations simplified imports, and ensured data integrity.
5. Shop technology & scalability
   The shop system was designed for growth from the outset. Interfaces to suppliers, payment and shipping methods, as well as automated processes for product and order data reduced manual effort and increased efficiency.
6. Go-live & iterative fine-tuning
   After go-live, the shop was continuously further developed. Optimizations in performance, UX, and feature scope ensured that the system remains sustainably and flexibly scalable.

Hosting setup

To ensure the ambitious agency project could be delivered in just six weeks, smooth interaction between development, infrastructure, and hosting was crucial. From the very beginning, the hosting architecture was actively integrated into the technical planning to optimally meet Shopware 6’s performance requirements and ensure an on-time go-live.

The Hosting at maxcluster formed the technical foundation for the implementation. The specially infrastructure optimized for Shopware 6 ensured high availability, performance and stability — both during the development phase and in ongoing operation.

With over twelve years of experience hosting e-commerce projects, maxcluster stands for reliability, performance, and technical excellence. The platform, specialized in online retail, is designed to support demanding projects in a stable, secure, and flexible way.

Against this backdrop, Mothership deliberately chose maxcluster as its hosting partner. The infrastructure offers maximum stability and flexibility—ideal conditions for delivering a complete shop relaunch in just six weeks.

maxcluster played a central role in the project’s technical implementation. The key factor was providing a high-performance, stable, and flexibly configurable hosting environment for Shopware 6. A suitable setup was implemented early in the project phase, meeting all requirements for time-to-market, performance, and scalability and forming the technical foundation for a successful go-live.

A complete shop relaunch within six weeks is ambitious – but with a reliable hosting partner like maxcluster at our side, we made it happen. And the shop wasn’t just implemented quickly; it’s stable, high-performing, and future-proof.

Andreas Emer, Managing Partner at Mothership

The impact of the measures implemented became clearly apparent shortly after go-live

Hosting by maxcluster provided the technical foundation for these results. The infrastructure optimized specifically for Shopware 6 ensured high availability, performance, and stability—even with growing traffic and large volumes of data.

Specifically, the following factors led to a noticeable improvement:
   

• Significantly reduced loading times through high-performance caching solutions such as Varnish and Redis—configured and optimized by maxcluster.
• Stable system availability, even during peak loads or extensive data imports from the PIM system.
• Automated monitoring and fast response times when anomalies occur for consistently high shop stability in live operation.
• Technical support at eye level, that actively supports setup, deployment, and performance tuning actively supports and avoids bottlenecks at an early stage.

This combination of technical precision, agile execution, and reliable hosting enabled a smooth project process and sustainable operational stability. This allowed the agency project Smart Home Lighting to achieve all defined goals and create a solid foundation for further growth.

The Smart Home Lighting agency project shows how technical expertise, agile ways of working, and reliable hosting come together to deliver a successful overall result. In just six weeks, a demanding starting situation was turned into a high-performing, future-ready online shop.

Close collaboration between Mothership and maxcluster provided the foundation for stability, performance, and sustainable growth.