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CASE STUDY
Howdens Eliminates Solr Upgrade Obstacles to Serve Customers at Scale
Proven stability with on-demand environments to accelerate peak season revenue and safeguard operations with built-in disaster recovery.
“We’ve been using SearchStax for over seven years. I’ve not found a single point in time when it hasn’t been available, powering our search. It’s always there when we need it.”
Paul Barnes | Web Platform Manager
Transforming Search - From DIY to Managed Search
Howdens, a FTSE 100 kitchen and joinery supplier with nearly 900 depots, moved from on-prem Solr to a managed Solr service as part of a broader migration to Azure and Sitecore. The goals: eliminate search risk, increase stability, optimize performance and free the team to focus on experiences that serve two distinct audiences — trade professionals who know exactly what they need and consumers who arrive looking for inspiration.
Uptime and predictable website performance are critical for a business like Howdens. Their trade customers need to quickly and accurately find products for their building projects and their consumer customers need to find inspiration on the site – effectively like a digital showroom. Search is core to this experience and the risk of Solr degradation isn’t just a threat to website functionality, but a threat to business reputation and revenue.
This case study will walk you through how Howdens:
- Unlocked enterprise-Grade Solr reliability without DIY complexity
- Built a website experience, with the help of Solr, that serves their unique user personas
- Optimized their Solr instance to guarantee right-sizing and uptime during their peak season
Challenges of Running Solr In-House
Howdens ran its CMS, IIS, and Solr stack on-prem across two UK data centers for production and DR. As part of a rapid digital transformation and a move to Azure PaaS, Howdens needed to de-risk Solr, improve resilience and scale for a growing, integrated .NET MVC application.
Stability and availability were critical requirements. As Howdens expanded its digital footprint, the search layer needed to deliver consistent uptime and predictable performance, no matter how traffic spiked or how complex the site became.
Performance was equally important. The business was under pressure to accelerate delivery and ensure the search experience could handle the growing demands of both trade and consumer audiences. Any dip in performance would directly affect how users found products and ultimately impact revenue.
The team also needed faster environment creation to support their parallel development and deployment process. With multiple environments to manage—dev, QA, pre-prod and production—being able to stand up new Solr clusters quickly and seamlessly was a must.
Finally, moving away from on-prem meant giving up the “comfort” of physically managing servers. Howdens required confidence that a managed service could provide the same level of trust they once had by controlling hardware themselves. In short, they needed the assurance that a third-party partner could deliver enterprise-grade Solr without compromise.
“From a SaaS product as important as search, reliability and availability are non-negotiable.”
– Paul Barnes, Web Platform Manager
How Managed Solr Simplifies Upgrades and Scale
Enterprise-grade Solr in the Cloud
SearchStax Managed Search Service replaced on-prem Solr and aligned to Howdens’ Azure strategy. The team gained managed clusters, lifecycle support and hands-on help commercializing and onboarding parallel environments.
Highlights:
Seamless Sitecore upgrade path. Moving from Sitecore 10.1 to 10.4 required new Solr instances. SearchStax provisioned parallel environments quickly, with clear commercials and right-sized resources.
Fast time to ready. Environments were available “straight out of the box,” with only a small custom package in a data handler.
Fast time to results. Once new environments were live, the team was able to connect, test and see performance benefits almost immediately. There was no lengthy tuning or troubleshooting cycle.
Observability fit. Howdens runs 24/7 ops with dashboards and alerting and is evolving toward full observability across Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics and Splunk. Search performance and availability slots into that end-to-end picture.
Barnes said, “From a SaaS product as important as search, reliability and availability are non-negotiable.”
The Impact on User Experience
Howdens serves two audiences on the same platform, and search underpins both journeys.
Trade: Precision and speed
The trade side of Howdens digital experience serves tradespeople like installers and builders who rely on their kitchen, joinery and hardware products.
These are pros who know what they need, down to specific stock keeping unit numbers (SKUs) and technical terms. They expect a digital experience with instant recall.
Search supports quick add-to-basket and depot collection for trade customers. Many pros bookmark product URLs, but search still powers discovery for new SKUs that complement repeat purchases.
Barnes expanded on the granularity their trade customers expect from their search, Our trade customers will say, ‘SKU1648—that’s the one.’ They type it in, find it, add to basket, and collect. Confidence in a search function that delivers their exact needs keeps them coming back.”
Consumer: Inspiration and discovery
The consumer side of the Howdens website serves non-trade customers; usually people who are interested in kitchen and home upgrades for their properties. Shoppers arrive at the search with broad intent like “kitchens,” “bedrooms” or “storage.”
Features built with their Solr instance, like facets, parent–child relationships and related items spark ideas and guide next steps to take their initial broad intent and focus it into actionable product discovery. Search connects consumers with items they didn’t know to look for, enriching the journey and providing a “digital showroom” experience.
Barnes explained, “Consumers don’t always know what they want at the start. Search links items and surfaces ideas they hadn’t considered.”
Equipping the depot team
Howdens also runs an internal portal that surfaces deeper technical specifications and ties into CRM data. Counter staff can immediately see recent orders and pull up exact product specs when tradespeople arrive.
“As soon as someone walks in, we know what they previously ordered and can bring it up on screen. Search supports that end-to-end flow.”
– Paul Barnes
Purpose-built Solr Search Infrastructure for Seasonality
September through October is Howdens’ busiest season, with 25–30% of annual profit in two months, spiking in the final days of October. Word-of-mouth from trusted tradespeople drives consumers to the site to explore options, and tradespeople to depots for buying.
Howdens performance-tests to double peak and keeps capacity high year-round, with SearchStax providing the stability needed when every minute counts.
“It really ramps up at the end of October. Search has to be there and be fast. With SearchStax, it is.”
– Paul Barnes
Innovation Unlocked: From Parallel Environments to AI Roadmaps
With search risk off the table and Solr stability locked in, the Howdens the delivery team can invest in new capabilities. Here’s a shortlist of what they’re freed up to work on.
Parallel dev environments: Like-for-like production systems for faster component work, spin up/tear down via containers.
AI search roadmap: Natural language queries, voice-driven input on mobile and automated item linking and recommendations.
Generative imagery: Pipeline to place SKU images into realistic scenes via the PIM, improving product presentation.
Targeted AI assistants: Lessons learned from a builder-facing chatbot now inform depot-staff tooling where guidance adds value.
Barnes expanded on what’s on the team’s radar for new AI implementations: “We’re exploring natural language search. Mobile voice input is pushing queries beyond keywords, and AI-driven linking between SKUs is a big opportunity.”
Enterprise-Grade Solr Reliability Without DIY Complexity
For Howdens, search isn’t just a back-end system; it’s the backbone of their digital experience. After years of relying on on-premise Solr, the shift to SearchStax Managed Search gave the team the confidence that their most business-critical platform would always be available. That reliability has held firm for more than seven years, giving Howdens peace of mind through peak trading seasons and major upgrades alike.
Equally important, the managed service model allows Howdens to move faster. Instead of wrestling with infrastructure, the team can stand up new environments with ease, test at scale and keep development aligned with the demands of a FTSE 100 enterprise. Transparency in costs and resources means the business can plan confidently while freeing the technology team to focus on innovation, from consumer inspirations journeys to AI-powered search experiments.
When asked “why SearchStax” the Howdens team cites the following:
Availability you can trust. Seven-plus years without a meaningful outage from the team’s perspective.
Frictionless upgrades. New Solr environments stood up quickly for Sitecore 10.4 with minimal customization.
Right-sized and transparent. Clear commercials and capacity aligned to Howdens’ performance model.
Enterprise partnership. Managed Solr that fits a 24/7 operations posture and evolving observability stack.
“People trust the server they can touch in a data center. With a managed service, you don’t have that, so you need confidence. SearchStax gave us that.”
– Paul Barnes
Results at a Glance
- Near-perfect availability for 7+ years, supporting an enterprise-scale, FTSE 100 website.
- Faster parallel environment onboarding for Sitecore 10.1 → 10.4 upgrade, including new Solr clusters.
- Predictable performance with on-demand scale-up for peak trading (September–October), when 25–30% of yearly profit is generated.
- Faceted navigation and parent–child relationships that drive inspiration for consumers and fast findability for trade.
- Internal depot portal + CRM integration that equips counter staff with instant technical specs and recent orders.
Product
Managed Search
Platform
Sitecore
Location
EMEA
Industry
Manufacturing
Let’s talk about how you can drive better site search experiences and gain insights with SearchStax