An online store has two jobs that pull in different directions: be found, and sell to whoever arrives. We build for both, and we are specific about the trade-offs.
The first is visibility. Product and category pages are where commercial search intent actually lands, and they are usually the weakest pages on the site — duplicated manufacturer descriptions, faceted filters generating thousands of near-identical crawlable URLs, no product schema, and pagination that leaves deeper pages effectively unreachable. The homepage gets all the attention; the pages that could earn the traffic get none.
The second is the checkout. Every additional field, unexpected cost and forced account creation removes a proportion of the people who had already decided to buy. This is the cheapest traffic you will ever have — they are at the till with their card out — and it is routinely squandered.
These are separate problems with separate fixes, and working on one while ignoring the other is why stores plateau.
Unique, useful copy where it counts, correct Product and Offer schema including price and availability, canonical handling for variants, and controlled crawling of faceted navigation so filter combinations do not consume your crawl budget.
Guest checkout, address lookup, clear delivery costs shown early, and the payment methods your customers expect. We instrument each step so abandonment can be attributed to a specific point rather than guessed at.
Product and category pages carry heavy imagery and frequently a stack of third-party scripts. We set a performance budget, serve responsive AVIF and WebP, and audit what each tag actually contributes — analytics and chat widgets are often the largest single cost on a product page.
Replatforming is where stores most often lose traffic permanently. We map every existing URL to its destination, keep 301 redirects in place, preserve or improve structured data, and monitor index coverage through the transition rather than declaring success at launch.
Stock, orders, fulfilment, accounting and carrier systems connected properly, so the store reflects reality and your team is not rekeying orders between systems.
Merchandising, pricing, promotions and content editable without a developer. If routine changes need a deployment, the build has failed at the design stage.
We choose from these based on what the project needs and what your team can maintain after we hand over — not on what we most enjoy working with. Where an existing stack is already in place and sound, we work within it.
The diagnosis is almost always in the funnel rather than the design. We instrument the path to purchase, find where people leave, and fix that specific step.
Technical and content work on category and product pages — the templates, the schema, the internal linking and the crawl control. This is slower to pay back than checkout work and usually worth more.
Moving to WooCommerce or a headless build for control over the template layer, the checkout or the cost base. Handled with the URL mapping done before anything launches.
Where template performance limits what the storefront can do, separating the storefront from the commerce engine is justified. For smaller catalogues it usually is not, and we will say so.
WooCommerce is the pragmatic choice for most small and mid-sized catalogues — mature, extensible, and your team can run it without a developer. A headless build is justified when storefront performance is a genuine constraint, when you need a storefront the template layer cannot deliver, or when several channels share one commerce engine. It costs more to build and more to maintain, so it should be a decision with a reason behind it.
It can, and that is the main risk in any replatform. The controllable factors are a complete URL map with 301 redirects, preserved page content and structured data, and index monitoring after launch. Handled carefully, most stores see a short dip and recover; handled carelessly, the losses can be permanent. We treat the redirect map as a deliverable in its own right.
By measuring first. We instrument the funnel, identify the step losing the most people, and address that step — most often delivery costs appearing late, forced account creation, or slow product pages on mobile. We do not have a standard list of changes to apply, because the bottleneck differs by store.
Yes — bulk imports, supplier feeds, scheduled synchronisation and the data cleaning that usually comes with them. Product data quality is frequently the constraint on both search visibility and conversion.
Yes. Stores need security patching, platform and plugin updates and seasonal work. We offer maintenance arrangements, and you are free to take the code elsewhere at any point.
Send us the problem and any constraints you already know about. We will come back with what we think it needs, an approach, and a realistic range — or tell you it is not work we are right for.
We build WordPress sites on purpose-built themes and a properly configured block editor, so your team can publish freely without the site slowing down every time they do.
We build websites and web applications in React and Next.js — server-rendered, measured against Core Web Vitals, and structured so Google can index every page you care about.
We design interfaces around evidence: what people are trying to do, where they currently fail, and what the build can realistically support.
