A client using a custom, WordPress-based eCommerce platform had grown quickly over 10 years in business, but was being increasingly held back by limitations in their current system: they couldn’t easily test or add new functionality, integrating with third-party tools required months of planning and thousands of pounds in custom development, and simply managing the system had become a huge time sink that distracted from their actual mission.
Like many companies on custom platforms, they had often thought about re-platforming but believed it was too big a risk to their organic SEO rankings, that the suite of custom functions in their current platform would be lost, and the costs involved in moving would simply be too great.
The Problem
They approached me to enquire about feasibility: which platforms were suitable, could they replicate their custom functions, how would their SEO be impacted and, most importantly, how quickly could it be done? With a contract renewal coming up in 12 weeks, they needed to know if it could all be done before they were locked in to another year.
The client had a successful store that had been operating for more than 10 years. Over that time, they had generated a huge amount of marketing content, taken tens of thousands of orders, and had a huge product catalogue of more than 50,000 SKUs. Everything need to be migrated safely & securely, and a host of custom functionality would need to be rebuilt to allow them to operate smoothly.
The solution
I presented a range of potential options, but Shopify Plus ticked all of the required boxes. A wealth of easy-to-integrate tools & plugins that could replicate virtually all of their custom functions and break them out of the walled garden of their current platform. Shopify is built with custom development in mind, making it quick and painless to add their remaining customisations. Between Shopify’s ecosystem of accessible, easily customisable themes and readily-available import tools, the client’s 12-week deadline would be more than enough time to get everything setup, imported and fully QA tested.
Over the course of just six weeks, I performed a full site redesign and build. All of their existing products, content & data were pulled directly from their database via SQL, carefully converted, and imported into Shopify, preserving complete order histories for all customers. With SEO being a key concern for the client, I created comprehensive redirect maps and added some on-page tweaks to ensure their organic rankings wouldn’t be damaged by the move.
The results
The project was successfully delivered in just six weeks with zero downtime and no operational interruptions, transforming the site’s performance, efficiency and user experience.
With a faster, cleaner layout, conversion rates jumped by 35%. SEO wasn’t just preserved – thanks to the SEO-safe migration and a faster, better-converting site, organic visibility leaped 120%. The client now had full, immediate access to just about every eCommerce tool in the world, meaning they could quickly integrate and test new plugins at will. All while reducing system costs and eliminating the time sink that platform management had become for them.
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