Case Study: Oscar Mike achieves dramatic site-speed improvements and higher conversions with WP Engine's Mercury platform

OscarMike.org Fulfills The Need For Speed

Oscar Mike (OscarMike.org) is a veteran-founded, mission-driven apparel ecommerce site that donates all profits to a nonprofit supporting injured veterans. The site features 200+ image-heavy products and was suffering from slow performance, downtime, and crashes under traffic spikes with its previous host (time to first byte around 4.5 seconds), which hurt conversions and customer experience.

To fix this, Oscar Mike rebuilt the site and joined WP Engine Labs’ Mercury alpha platform—an HHVM-based, highly available hosting environment with geo-redundancy and auto failover. The move cut TTFB to about 600–700 ms, made the site “ridiculously fast,” improved conversion rates and cart abandonment, sped up product uploads and customer response, and allowed the site to handle traffic spikes reliably.

Oscar Mike

Zach Stepek

Developer