How MAXBURST Gave Couristan’s Headless Product Catalog a Zero-Incident Backend on Pressable
Couristan is a family-run flooring and rug brand that has been in business since 1926. By moving the WordPress backend of Couristan’s headless product catalog from self-managed servers to Pressable, its longtime agency MAXBURST took server management off its plate, has had zero incidents since the move, and put that senior developer time back into Couristan’s catalog and integrations.
About Couristan
Couristan was founded in 1926 by the Couri brothers and is still family-run. It sells handmade and power-loomed area rugs along with residential and hospitality carpeting, and its website serves four very different buyers: homeowners, interior designers, dealers, and hospitality and commercial trade buyers. Each one searches the catalog differently, and many arrive looking for a specific construction, fiber, or colorway before they ever talk to sales.
Couristan has worked with MAXBURST, a New York agency and Pressable Pro Partner that builds websites for manufacturers and industrial B2B companies, for more than ten years. When Couristan’s catalog outgrew the third-party SQL server it ran on, MAXBURST rebuilt it on WooCommerce in catalog mode. The team restructured the product data into filterable attributes like collection, construction, fiber, colorway, and application, rebuilt product discovery around how each buyer type searches, and added a quote basket that sends designer and dealer requests straight into Salesforce. That rebuild alone increased search-to-product conversions by 65% and mobile engagement by 40%.
The Challenge: A Headless Backend the Agency Had to Run Itself
MAXBURST built Couristan’s new site as a headless setup, with a separate front end and a WordPress backend that serves product data to it and processes quote submissions into Salesforce. That backend ran on DigitalOcean, which meant MAXBURST owned the whole stack: OS patching, PHP and MySQL versions, server-level caching, security hardening, backups, and monitoring.
None of that was work Couristan was paying MAXBURST to do, and none of it made the site better for buyers. It still took senior developer time every week, and the occasional unplanned afternoon when something needed attention.
The stakes are higher in a headless build. With no page cache in front of the backend, every request from the front end has to be answered quickly, and the backend has to stay available all the time. A headless front end is only as fast as the data it’s waiting on.
Why Pressable
Owning Couristan’s catalog data was the whole point of the rebuild, so MAXBURST needed a host that left the data layer in its hands. Couristan’s deep catalog, four audiences, and heavy faceted search also called for infrastructure that handled scaling and caching well.
Pressable covered both. MAXBURST kept full ownership of the code and data, while Pressable took over updates and patching, nightly backups with hourly database backups, WordPress-specific caching, and staging environments, with support from WordPress specialists. Pressable being part of Automattic, the company behind WooCommerce, also mattered to MAXBURST, since being close to the people who build WooCommerce helps when a client’s requirements go past the documentation.
“Moving Couristan to Pressable took server management off our plate entirely, and that time went straight back into the catalog and the integrations. Just as valuable is what we can tell the client. When they ask whether the site is secure or what happens if something breaks overnight, we don’t hedge anymore. That confidence is worth as much as the hours.”
– Andrew Ruditser, Co-Founder and Lead Technology Coordinator, MAXBURST
In April 2026, MAXBURST moved the WordPress backends for both the main Couristan site and its contract hospitality site to Pressable. Today the backend serves product data to the front end, takes in quote basket submissions for Salesforce, handles catalog and content updates from the Couristan team, and runs the media library, user accounts, and dealer access database.
The Results:
• Zero incidents since the move. Uptime is no longer something MAXBURST has to manage or explain to Couristan.
• Senior developer time back on the catalog. The patching, version management, and cache tuning that used to fill part of every week has largely disappeared, and those hours now go into Couristan’s catalog, integrations, and front end.
• A fast backend for a headless front end. Backend response times have stayed consistently good under load, which shows up directly in how quickly the front end can serve visitors.
• Catalog issues diagnosed in minutes with Pressable MCP. MAXBURST can check the backend and pull what it needs with simple prompts, without leaving the environment it’s debugging in.
Debugging with Pressable MCP
MAXBURST was already using Pressable MCP across its 200+ site portfolio, and it paid off on Couristan a few weeks after launch. The front end started showing stale product data on a handful of collections, even though the backend had the right updates.
Tracking that down would usually take about an hour of switching between tools: opening MyPressable, finding the site, pulling logs, and checking them against deploy times. Instead, the team checked the backend’s status and pulled what it needed through Pressable MCP, right inside the environment where it was already debugging. Within a few minutes, MAXBURST had traced the issue to a caching layer on its own side and confirmed Pressable wasn’t the cause.
“Couristan has been around for more than a century, so we think in decades, not quarters. Our site is how designers and dealers find our products every day, and since MAXBURST moved our WordPress infrastructure to Pressable it simply hasn’t been something I worry about. We get enterprise-grade hosting while still owning everything that matters, which is the right footing for a site we plan to keep building on for a long time.”
Larry Mahurter
Senior VP of Marketing, Couristan
Ready to hand off server management and get back to client work? Talk to the Pressable team at pressable.com/request-demo.