All case studies

Commerce + API

Fulton Fried Pies

Astro + Express pre-order platform that scores 99 on Lighthouse performance.

Fulton Fried Pies product photography from the live site hero

Lighthouse scores

Live URL audit · 2026-07-23

99
Performance
96
Accessibility
100
Best Practices
92
SEO

Lighthouse CLI against https://fultonpies.com (mobile emulation).

Challenge

The shop needed more than a brochure site: flavor voting, pre-orders, admin workflows, and social automation — without the bloat of a WordPress + plugin stack that agencies typically ship.

Solution

We engineered a split architecture: Astro 6 SSG for blistering page loads, Express 5 for orders and admin, Firebase App Hosting for the runtime, Square for payments, and SendGrid for transactional email. One repo, two environments (prod + demo), full code ownership.

Stack

Astro 6Tailwind CSS v4TypeScriptExpress 5Firebase App HostingFirestoreSquareSendGridTwilio

Engineering highlights

Architecture

Static marketing surface + Cloud Run Express API

Payments

Square checkout wired into pre-order flow

Ops

Prod/demo backends from one repo via App Hosting YAML

Ownership

Full source on client-accessible GitHub

Results

  • Lighthouse Performance 99 / Accessibility 96 / Best Practices 100 (live audit)
  • LCP ~1.9s on mobile lab — agency WordPress rebuilds rarely clear 4s
  • Pre-order + flavor-vote APIs without a page-builder tax
  • Client owns the GitHub repo — no vendor lock-in

Want this level of engineering?

Agency-grade builds without agency overhead. You own the repo. You talk to the engineer.

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