Freezedry

A Lithuanian store selling freeze dryers across the EU had machine translation that kept “hanging”, so new languages never went live, and several countries saw broken or empty pages.

• Translation: found the real cause — every translation engine was switched off and its registration broken — and got automatic DeepL translation working; translatable custom fields, the theme moved from hard-coded languages to gettext in 17 files, localized checkout placeholders, VAT names, contact-form texts and size labels for every language.
• New languages: French, then Spanish, Italian and Finnish — product lists, delivery labels, checkout and tax names included.
• Home page: a slider integration with a safe fallback to the old slider, a separate slider per language and per device, an admin page to assign sliders to languages without code, and an interactive “where we’ve sold” map of Europe built from WooCommerce data.
• Shipping: carts in four countries were getting free delivery because categories were matched by Lithuanian/English slugs only; now categories map through the translation layer for any language, and products without a category are logged.
• Reliability: a recursion that crashed pages with 503 errors fixed, PHP 8 fatal errors on empty fields guarded in 13 places, PHP 8.2 deprecations removed, CDN libraries pinned to exact versions with integrity hashes.
• Speed: hero images per language converted to WebP, cache-busting for CSS and JS.
• Process: changes made directly on production synced into git byte for byte, branches with reviewed pull requests, deploys to staging and production with a database backup.

Eight languages live (LT, EN, DE, NL, FR, ES, IT, FI); French launched with all 32 pages and 26 products. All 26 products in Italy, Spain and Finland now get correct shipping. A debug log that had grown to about 12 GB was stopped, another log went from 194 MB to 8.5 KB, and the hero image dropped from about 1.5 MB to 143 KB.