Case study 02 · Globy · B2B marketplace
Angular 12 to 16, plus SSR.
Without a rewrite.
Globy is a global B2B marketplace that connects manufacturers and wholesalers with buyers worldwide, with logistics tools on top: requests for quotation, freight and container-load calculators, container tracking and ship schedules. When Denys joined, the product was stuck on an old Angular version and search engines saw only a fraction of its public pages.
- Product
- B2B marketplace for wholesale trade and logistics
- Our role
- Lead frontend engineer (Denys)
- Period
- April 2022 → May 2024
- Team
- Grew from 5 to 9 people; frontend from 1 to 5
platform traffic during the engagement
page-speed score (Lighthouse) on public pages
public pages ready for search engines
frontend developers, hired and onboarded by Denys
The challenge
By the end of 2022 the product was stuck on Angular 12: key dependencies didn't support newer versions, and every month on the old version added risk.
Its public pages — products and the blog — were rendered only in the browser, so search engines indexed just a fraction of the marketplace. The frontend was a single developer.
Results
- Platform traffic grew 2–3× during the engagement, and several times more pages were indexed after the switch to server-side rendering.
- Four major Angular versions up, from 12 to 16, without pausing feature work or rewriting the product.
- Page-speed score on public pages up from about 40 to 70+.
- A frontend team of five instead of one.
Absolute traffic and registration figures are confidential, so traffic growth is shown as a multiple.
What we did
- 01
Angular 12 → 16, one step at a time
Denys made the case for the upgrade to the client; the team then moved up one version at a time alongside feature work, forking or replacing the libraries that blocked the way.
- 02
Visible in search
Server-side rendering for every public page of the live product: several weeks of work, plus about three weeks of polish after release.
- 03
Faster public pages
Performance work took the page-speed score from about 40 to 70+.
- 04
The B2B Market
Product catalogue with filters and search, product pages, requests for quotation and chat between buyers and suppliers.
- 05
A bigger team
Denys hired and onboarded four frontend developers and joined client meetings whenever the team ran into problems.
Under the hood
SSR for an app that wasn't built for it
The code talked to the browser directly, some libraries broke on the server, and nobody on the team had done server-side rendering before. Denys fixed it systematically instead of rewriting:
- Browser-only code wrapped in server-safe abstractions and guarded by platform checks.
- Libraries that break on the server loaded only in the browser.
- About ten public page templates adapted, then server-side rendering released to the whole site at once.
SSR went live without rewriting the product.
How we worked
Scrum in Jira with joint estimation, retrospectives, review on every change and weekly releases. Communication went mostly through the PM; Denys joined client meetings directly when the team ran into problems.
Stack
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