Stone's Honey
WooCommerce to Shopify website migration for Stone's Honey
"From our first meeting with Webselect, it was clear that they had the knowledge, experience and technical expertise to give our website a much needed facelift and to help to improve the online presence of our brand. We are extremely pleased with the site that Webselect have built for us - it looks great, the navigation is very much improved and, overall, it is so much more user friendly. Throughout the process, the team at Webselect were friendly and approachable and, critically, were very responsive to our questions, queries and ideas. Communication throughout was fast and clear. The training that we received on our chosen e-commerce platform has also been crucial in giving us the confidence to get the most out of our new website. Overall, working with Webselect has been a positive experience and we would not hesitate to recommend them to anybody looking to drive their business forward through online means."
Background to a WooCommerce migration
Stones Honey was founded in 2015 as a result of the founder, Jason's passion for beekeeping as a hobby, which grew into a business online with a WooCommerce website. Stones Honey is a family business and operates a number of honey production apiaries, all based in the South Hams region of Devon and within a five-mile radius of Ivybridge, between the edge of Dartmoor and the South Devon coast. Gold award winning in 'Taste of the West;' Stones Honey's aim is to produce and supply top quality honey, direct from the hive. Every jar of Stone's Honey can be traced back to its production apiary and is unpasteurised, unblended and coarse-filtered to retain all of the flavour and all of the nutrition.
The primary purpose of the Stones Honey WooCommerce to Shopify website migration was to deliver online selling to:
- Sell a range of award-winning honey products and gift packages and improve technical SEO ranking
- Showcase the story, passion and premium natural produce with more effective User Experience (UX)
- Manage a growing e-commerce site with great reports and manage mixed VAT bundles
- Have a site that is optimised for mobile devices, fast, great user experience, navigation and to increase conversion
Objectives of a migration from WooCommerce to Shopify
The website was a WordPress website with Woocommerce plugin. The site has supported good double digit growth in sales as a start up, however, was at a point where the support level from the incumbent was not reactive enough and security and WordPress plugin updates were not being applied. Overall the growing business required an agency with experience and service levels to take the journey for Jason forward and modernise to compete.
Jason was frustrated with the increasing limitations to administer and make changes to his site as he wanted to make them to reflect his products.
Jason wanted a cost effective solution to take his e-commerce strategy forward and wanted to understand what the best e-commerce platform was for his needs and we agreed that a Shopify website would be the right choice for him.
Three large factors were of significant importance for a new Shopify website that were significant issues with the old WooCommerce site, they were:
- Managing bundles / or multi-product gift packs with mixed VAT values. Some food products attracted no VAT and some gift products did - however the value of the items was amended due to the 'gift bundle' adding some complexity
- Organic SEO, Jason had good rankings for product keywords and 'Devon Honey' but was struggling in other areas and wanted to understand where the opportunities were
- Integration with Jason's preferred fulfilment and accountancy products
We undertook a quick inspect of the WooCommerce site, a few issues were obvious from a technical perspective that were impacting SEO rankings and site authority and needed addressing:
- Unused 3rd party cascading style sheets (CSS)
- Images not in next-gen formats
- Images not correctly sized
- Large amounts of 3rd party scripts slowing initial load time
- A constant loading page, as part of the old design, whenever going from one page to another, which was not great user experience and we suspected a cause for high bounce rates
- A lot of contrasting colours which is bad for readability and accessibility as part of the old design
The existing site analytics data was difficult to see as it had not been set up well, however we could see that the site's domain authority was very low (single digit), that the site's conversion rate was low, < 1% and the bounce rate was relatively high. All these points required mitigation in the investment to replatform from WooCommerce to a Shopify website.
What We Did to Deliver a Shopify Website
Webselect are experts in e-commerce site migrations from WooCommerce to Shopify, we spent a lot of time talking with Jason about what he wanted to achieve, what this would mean for his business. We built confidence that we understood his business, his 'pain' and what the solutions looked like. Not only making technical changes but also helping to understand how his content strategy could help with organic SEO in his sector and advising on buying an additional website domain.
Our focus was initially on advising on the right Shopify product level, why that met his needs now and in the future for e-commerce sustainability as well as anticipated costs to operate on the platform including the costs from transaction fees and app fees.
From a solution and website migration perspective we delivered the following for Stone's Honey in the Migration from WooCommerce to Shopify website:
- Migrated all content, images, text from WooCommerce to Shopify Website
- Added Dawn theme (V2.x) to theme library and setup development environment
- Apply colour scheme & fonts to the site
- Create header and footer layout including new navigation structure
- Create landing page with hero section, clear call to actions for promoted products
- Sections can be changed and additional ones added depending on your needs. Sections will be created using existing assets that exist in the Dawn theme
- Add Blog section
- Changes to collection and product layouts
- SEO improvements (Favicon, Social sharing imagery, Metadata etc)
- Resolved the mixed VAT in product bundles and helped Jason to understand how this was to be managed going forward
- Integrated with Royal Mail fulfilment and accountancy software
- Conducted a SEO and keyword analysis on the existing site to advise and inform strategy going forward
- Full end to end testing & cross browser/device testing
- Training and support during project build and handover session
"We are extremely pleased with the site that Webselect have built for us - it looks great, the navigation is very much improved and, overall, it is so much more user friendly. Throughout the process, the team at Webselect were friendly and approachable and, critically, were very responsive to our questions, queries and ideas. Communication throughout was fast and clear."
Results of a Successful Website Migration
After migrating Stone's Honey from WooCommerce to Shopify, significant improvements were observed across multiple fronts, resulting in enhanced online visibility, user experience, and operational efficiency.
Enhanced User Experience and Navigation
The migration to an e-commerce Shopify website allowed for a more intuitive and responsive website design, optimised for mobile devices and delivering a seamless user experience. By eliminating navigation bottlenecks and a clear call-to-action structure on landing pages, visitors can easily explore Stone's Honey's range of award-winning products and gift packages. The removal of the constant loading page and improvement in readability and accessibility through harmonised colour schemes enhanced user engagement and reduced bounce rates, further contributing to improved conversion rates.
Streamlined Operations and Management of the E-commerce Store
One of the primary challenges addressed through the migration was the effective management of bundled products with mixed VAT values. By resolving this issue and integrating with preferred fulfilment and accountancy software, Stone's Honey could streamline its e-commerce operations, ensuring accurate pricing and compliance with VAT rules. Additionally, the adoption of Shopify's robust reporting capabilities empowered Jason to manage the growing e-commerce site more efficiently, with comprehensive insights into sales performance and customer behaviour.
Future-Proofing and Sustainability
By partnering with Webselect, Stone's Honey not only migrated its website but also gained valuable insights and guidance on sustainable e-commerce strategies. Through thorough consultation, Jason gained clarity on choosing the right Shopify product level and anticipated costs, ensuring the platform's scalability and long-term viability for his business. Furthermore, the SEO and keyword analysis conducted on the existing site informed future content strategies, enhancing organic search visibility and ensuring continued growth in online visibility and revenue generation.
In conclusion, the migration from WooCommerce to Shopify marked a significant milestone for Stone's Honey, paving the way for sustained growth, improved operational efficiency, and enhanced customer satisfaction. With a more robust and user-friendly online platform, Stone's Honey is poised to further establish itself as a leading provider of premium natural honey products, delivering unparalleled quality and satisfaction to its customers.
"The training that we received on our chosen e-commerce platform has also been crucial in giving us the confidence to get the most out of our new website. Overall, working with Webselect has been a positive experience and we would not hesitate to recommend them to anybody looking to drive their business forward through online means."
Results
Before
The original site was a WooCommerce integration with Wordpress. It had been built some years previously and was deteriorating due to lack of maintenance. Plugins were not being updated and relatively minor updates were becoming hard or impossible to make.
The site was not performing optimally, it was slow, the domain authority was low and the user experience was not the premium experience that the brand wanted to portray. A design element in the site that was really impacting UX and performance was the inclusion of a Bee logo interstitial on every page transition. Navigation was small and the eye was not drawn to it. The basket was not obvious enough, image sizes were not correct, Unused 3rd party cascading style sheets (CSS) and in the design there was bad use of contrast in text and backgrounds that was impacting accessibility.
Two key areas that were impacting growth of the business on the website were that managing bundles (Honey Gift Hampers) was impossible, there were issues with mixed products and their VAT recovery, as well as being able to have a bundle price that was not a multiplication of the units within it.
The other area was the deteriorating SEO, domain authority and search engine rankings. The site had not been crawled recently, there were bad backlinks, copy was not optimised for strategic keywords and overall the site was letting itself down in attracting and converting customers.
After
We set up a new Shopify Basic account for Stone's, loaded the new V2 templates and migrated the content and data from the old site. Ongoing operational costs were to be kept to a minimum, so we carefully researched and integrated the best apps to meet the new requirements that were well reviewed, had good developer feedback and were ideally free or very low cost.
From a design and UX perspective we were working to a brief of simplicity, quality and product presentation. The design theme we made was consistent with yellow and black, ensuring clear right sized images, navigation was simplified with roll-over drop down options and the basket was made more prominent and identifiable. We took time to ensure that contrasts were good and all copy and text was clear and accessible.
We crafted a way for Stone's honey to be able to create and manage Gift Bundles and manage VAT in the admin and for VAT returns as well as solving the problem to be able to set the gift bundle price over the combined unit prices.
We also completed a full SEO and Keyword audit of the site, reviewed competitors, identified bad backlinks and provided Stones honey with a clear actionable documented strategy to manage their content and ranking going forward.
Through the project we worked with the administrative staff at Stone's Honey to help them learn the Shopify admin side, we also followed up post deployment to answer questions and ensure that the new ways of working with the website were embedded.
Overall the feedback on the new website has been very positive and the feedback from Jason Stone was "We are extremely pleased with the site that Webselect have built for us - it looks great, the navigation is very much improved and, overall, it is so much more user friendly"