Ruland Manufacturing: Long-Term Magento Commerce Modernization & Managed Services

Ruland Manufacturing Co., Inc. is a family-owned U.S. manufacturer of shaft collars, rigid couplings, and motion control couplings. Founded in 1937 and headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts, Ruland designs and produces its products in-house under strict quality controls using proprietary processes.

Ruland serves demanding, precision-driven industries including packaging, printing, medical, semiconductor, food processing, alternative energy, and factory automation. The company is recognized for maintaining one of the largest shaft collar and coupling inventories in the industry, backed by a reputation for consistent quality, reliability, and fast delivery.

Ruland relies on its Magento Commerce store as a critical sales channel. Like many mature eCommerce platforms that have evolved over many years, it needed a partner that could keep the platform operational while continually improving security, performance, scalability, and customer experience, and integrating Magento with the company’s broader technology ecosystem. As traffic increased and Adobe Commerce evolved, Ruland also needed to modernize its infrastructure without disrupting day-to-day business operations.

Ruland’s storefront had matured over many years into a heavily customized, business-critical platform. Sustaining and advancing it introduced several ongoing challenges:

Primary Challenges

• Aging, heavily customized platform: A business-critical Magento store that had accumulated customization and technical debt over many years, making upgrades and changes higher-risk.
• Version upgrades with minimal downtime: Adobe Commerce needed to advance (including to 2.4.8) without disrupting daily business operations.
• Performance and scalability pressure: Rising traffic demanded faster page loads, stronger caching, and reliability during spikes.
• Security and compliance exposure: A payment-processing storefront required continuous hardening and ongoing PCI compliance.
• A fragmented technology ecosystem: Magento had to integrate and stay in sync with multiple third-party business systems.
• Infrastructure modernization: Legacy hosting needed to move to a scalable, resilient cloud environment.

What the Client Needed

• Provide ongoing Magento development and support
• Perform Adobe Commerce version upgrades while minimizing downtime
• Improve site performance and page speed
• Integrate Magento with third-party business systems
• Strengthen website security and maintain PCI compliance
• Resolve production incidents quickly
• Modernize hosting infrastructure on AWS
• Improve reliability during traffic spikes
• Optimize the checkout experience
• Establish a scalable architecture for future growth

Over the course of the partnership, Wagento became an extension of Ruland’s internal team, delivering improvements across nearly every aspect of the Magento ecosystem.

1. Adobe Commerce Development

• Multiple Magento and Adobe Commerce version upgrades (including 2.4.8)
• Composer dependency management
• Module upgrades and compatibility fixes
• Static content deployment improvements
• PHP upgrades
• Elasticsearch configuration
• Frontend styling and UX improvements
• Checkout optimization and bug fixes
• Product catalog improvements
• Navigation and layered navigation enhancements

2. Performance Optimization

• Varnish cache optimization
• Edge Side Includes (ESI) implementation
• Cache cleanup and hole-punching improvements
• Product Listing Page (PLP) load optimization
• Cloudflare optimization and rate limiting configuration
• Bot and crawler management, including robots.txt optimization
• Server-side tracking and Google Tag Manager server-side configuration

3. Integrations

Throughout the engagement, Magento was integrated and maintained alongside several business-critical platforms, including Cloudflare, AWS, Google Tag Manager, server-side analytics, Authorize.Net, TaxJar, the SansSec security platform, FTP services, and SSL certificate management.

These integrations ensured secure payment processing, accurate tax calculation, reliable analytics, infrastructure resiliency, and operational efficiency.

4. Infrastructure Modernization

One of the most significant initiatives was modernizing the hosting environment. Projects included:

• AWS hosting migration
• AWS Management Console implementation
• Graviton instance migration
• NGINX upgrades and infrastructure optimization
• Decoupled architecture proof of concept
• CloudFormation deployment and infrastructure validation
• Cron optimization
• High availability planning and ongoing hosting support

5. Security & Compliance

Security became an ongoing pillar of the relationship. Major initiatives included:

• Adobe APSB security patch implementation
• PCI compliance remediation
• Composer vulnerability remediation
• Cross-site scripting (XSS) remediation
• Malware detection and cleanup
• SansSec deployment and security scanning
• SSL management and Cloudflare security hardening
• Attack mode implementation during incidents
• Linux kernel vulnerability remediation

6. Managed Services

Beyond project work, Wagento served as Ruland’s long-term Magento managed services partner, providing incident response, production outage recovery, root cause analysis, monthly release reviews, security patching, performance tuning, infrastructure monitoring, and continuous improvement planning.

Services Provided (Full Scope)

• Adobe Commerce / Magento development and upgrades
• Performance and caching optimization
• Third-party systems integration
• AWS cloud migration and infrastructure modernization
• Security remediation and PCI compliance
• Long-term managed services, monitoring, and support