The Brief
Redesign and redevelop the existing online store. The current website was slow, hard to update and difficult to maintain.
The store needed custom functionality, an overhaul of the shipping rules, additional payment gateways, an optimized customer journey, and a way to reduce cart abandonments.
The Approach
Andrew and Louise Berry had a clear idea of how the website should look from the outset – so we worked with them closely to design a classic eCommerce store with pastel color scheme to bring a fresh feeling to the site.
Site speed and page editing
We tackled the issue of site speed by building a lightweight custom theme with no extraneous code.
Plugin usage was reduced with custom coding.
Pages that had been bloated with page builder code were rebuilt with custom fields that continued and improved on editing flexibility.
Images were optimized and lazy loaded to improve time to first byte (TTFB) and reduce page load time.
CSS and javascript files were minified and optimized, and caching added to help serve up pages quickly.
The htaccess file was tweaked with best practices.
Custom functionality
We introduced points and rewards to reward customers for purchases. The system encourages users to register in order to earn points which can then be redeemed as a discount.
We also added engraving options on engravable product pages. A minimum and maximum number of characters can be set along with a choice of font and the option to charge for the service.
On the checkout page we added a giftwrap and card option so customers can now have their orders wrapped in store and include a personalised note.
