Créarègle
A rebuild of a tracing-tool and scrapbooking shop as a headless architecture: Next.js storefront, custom back-office, and Medusa backend, ready to replace WooCommerce without losing earned search ranking.
- Year
- 2026 — bascule à venir
- Role
- Architecture, development and infrastructure
- Scope
- Headless architecture · Storefront · Business back-office · Migration · Infrastructure
- Stack
- Next.js · Medusa · PostgreSQL · Redis · Stripe · Docker · Playwright
The context
Créarègle sells, from Belz in Morbihan, tracing rulers and framing and scrapbooking tools designed by Anne-Marie Gicquel. A loyal clientele, a precise catalogue, and a WooCommerce shop that had reached the end of its model: slow, hard to evolve, and unable to express the real rules of the activity — delivery priced on the carrier scale, B2B pricing, continuous sale with stock thresholds that stay strictly internal.
The choice was to separate responsibilities. A proven commerce backend for writes, a server-rendered storefront for speed and search ranking, and a custom back-office for what the craft actually does every day.
The non-negotiable constraint: lose neither ranking, nor orders, nor customer history during cutover.
The architecture
The storefront is a Next.js application in server rendering and incremental regeneration: shop, customer account, Stripe checkout, and SEO metadata. All commercial writes go through the backend APIs — no price or stock logic lives in the front.
The custom back-office gathers what a generic back-office cannot express: returns, exchanges and claims, payment and emailing incidents, stock journal, replenishment, and manual orders. It is protected by password, attempt limiting, and distinct roles — an operations account can change neither settings, nor products, nor users.
A handful of operational automations run on a short interval. None triggers a silent commercial mutation: they create traceable incidents that a human arbitrates.
What the rebuild guarantees
- Old WooCommerce URLs redirected and checked by automated tests, to keep earned search ranking.
- Dry-run migrations required before the real cutover, with a verified restore and encrypted object-locked backups on critical archives.
- Accessibility at WCAG 2.2 AA, covered by automated tests on critical journeys, on mobile as on desktop.
- Truly consent-first audience measurement: no analytics identifier created before acceptance, purchases recorded server-side and deduplicated by order.
The infrastructure
The whole runs in containers: PostgreSQL behind PgBouncer, Redis for cache and queues, and a reverse proxy that terminates TLS. Database, cache, and connection pool stay private, never exposed.
Backups go to encrypted object storage, with versioning, lifecycle, and locking on critical archives. The restore procedure is written and tested — that is the only way to know a backup really exists.
Production deployment is triggered by hand from a version publication, after passing through a staging environment protected by authentication.
Prepare a project of the same order
Decisions to take before scoping, design, or migration.
