Pousses & Plantes bills itself as the first website for French-grown plants: a marketplace where growers sell plants and accessories directly to consumers. In spring 2025 the platform was about to feature in a France 5 TV report, broadcast on 22 April 2025. A national broadcast sends a surge of visitors within minutes that an ordinary WordPress shop cannot absorb: the goal was for the site to stay up and fast at the very moment the audience discovered it.
The project in detail
The shop runs on WordPress, WooCommerce and Dokan, a plugin that lets several sellers each manage their catalogue, orders and shipping. The original install had been assembled by hand, with 23 plugins: impossible to reproduce, hard to update, and with no measure of what it could take under traffic.
With a small Arbre Agile team we first deployed the platform on Kubernetes, then chose to move the whole stack to Docker on a dedicated server: WordPress and MariaDB in a single Docker Compose setup behind Traefik, with staging and production environments described in the same repository. I built the reproducible WordPress image carrying the configuration and the 23 plugins, and the GitLab continuous integration that builds and publishes it on every change. An update becomes a deployment like any other, and a rollback a matter of minutes.
I then tuned WordPress for load: page caching with WP Rocket, Cloudflare settings built into the configuration so that as many pages as possible are served from the delivery network, image optimisation and removal of useless volumes. To check the result I wrote Locust load scenarios reproducing the behaviour of a TV audience: home page visits, product and information pages, account sign-ups. The tests ran in April 2025 on the staging environment, before the broadcast.
The team work deserves precision. Alexandre MOULLARD led the Kubernetes deployment, the replicated MariaDB database and volume snapshot backups. Florian FRIS-LARROUY built the custom theme, including the "find your plant" module, the featured products and the accessories page. The site is still online, now hosted outside the infrastructure we set up, so I do not link to the current version.