WordPress To Shopify Migration For a European Eyewear Retailer

How switching from an outdated WordPress website with a WooCommerce plugin to a sleek Shopify platform with a tailored theme empowered the French eyewear retailer to accelerate loading speed x6, lower bounce rate twice, increase session durations fourfold, and boost page visits per session by 64% — all without missing a beat in their operations.

Web Development

Software Product Development

Home / Shopify

Business сhallenge

Grappling with fierce competition, owners of ecommerce businesses know better than anyone how tough it is to win customers and turn them into regulars. Especially, when a raft of external factors have already been preventing ecom companies from capturing buyers’ attention.

While environmental, economic, and political hurdles are something that you can’t fend off, there are areas within your control – and technical prowess of your ecommerce solution is definitely among them.

Facing the challenge of revamping their tech foundation, our client — a leading French eyewear brand with a production hub and a network of over 20 retail stores — sought to elevate their three-year-old ecommerce solution, crafted on WordPress with WooCommerce integration.

Why did the existing online store with the WooCommerce plugin become a pain in the neck for the client?

Due to a slew of plugins and underlying spaghetti code, their website’s loading time increased to a concerning 6 seconds. While this didn’t impact its visual appeal, it significantly affected user experience, leading to brief average use sessions of under 30 seconds and a 70% bounce rate. It’s an urgent matter we can’t overlook.
There were problems with updating and maintaining of the current ecommerce entity as updates for plugins and WordPress versions aren’t synchronized. Situations where the update was available for WordPress but not plugins were far from rare.

This left our client in a tight spot: prioritize security by upgrading WordPress and risk plugin functionality, or patiently wait for a full alignment of updates? As you can probably guess, neither of which seemed an attractive option.

Considering its outdated nature and maintenance challenges, the existing store was exposed to security vulnerabilities. Notably, the client’s previous system leaned heavily on the jQuery library, deemed unsafe by modern security standards.
There was no easy — or even remotely acceptable — way to add localization for Belgium, where the client was going to open new brick-and-mortar stores. With WordPress, they would have had to invest a sizable chunk of time and budget in adding a new language version by installing another plugin, which would have slowed down the loading speed even more.

The client has investigated available options and reached out to *instinctools with a request for WordPress to Shopify migration services.

As an all-in-one ecommerce platform, Shopify was expected to meet their current and future needs since it:

Can handle up to 10,000 requests per minute
Eliminates the need to deal with website updates and maintenance, which are the responsibility of the platform’s tech support
Simplifies content management thanks to the isolated fields in the admin panel so that employees can easily update the content without the risk of breaking the system

Keeps the security bar high
Offers free localizations for additional markets with a built-in auto-redirect without affecting the client’s search engine ranking
Provides vital ecommerce functionality, such as a multi-currency plugin, an automatic country-by-country tax calculator, analytics section, etc., right out of the box

How to migrate from WordPress to Shopify seamlessly and provide a client with a soaped-up new ecommerce solution, and what Shopify nuances did we have to deal with?

Solution

WordPress to Shopify migration wasn’t the client’s first project with *instinctools. The new Shopify store was supposed to become a part of a comprehensive ecommerce ecosystem, crafted by our dedicated team within our long-term cooperation with the client.

We didn’t need to deal with the hassle of WordPress data migration to Shopify thanks to our team’s prior work, which included developing an inventory and logistics app and an ERP system for the client. All the required data was extracted from the shared back end of these solutions.

However, there still were issues that we had to sort out to successfully migrate from WordPress to Shopify.

Matching Shopify’s capabilities with the specifics of eyewear products

Although Shopify provides a plethora of vital ecommerce features out of the box, such as a multi-currency plugin, an automatic country-by-country tax calculator, an analytics section, etc., our dedicated team developed a custom theme in line with the client’s corporate style, and fine-tuned the solution’s initial setup considering the specifics of the client’s business and products.

Chose a pricing plan based on product variation limits

Glasses can be of different sizes and colors, yet it’s still one product available in multiple variations, with different prices and quantities in stock. Shopify’s standard plan has a limitation – the total amount of variations of a single product can’t exceed 100.

As for the moment of WordPress to Shopify product migration, the client had a maximum of 60 variations of one product. We’ve negotiated that until the next solution upgrade (in nearly three years), the basic version of Shopify is enough to cover their needs.

When the number of variations approaches 100, the client will need to upgrade to Shopify+, but until then, there’s no need to overpay for a high-tier plan.

* For example, these glasses have 40 variations due to the combination of colors with parameters, such as diopters for near and far sight or without diopters, transparent or sun lenses.

Found a way to add more than three parameters in the product descriptions

Every product has a set of different attributes – size, color, width, etc. There are many more parameters for eyeglasses – weight, lenses, dioptres, interpupillary distance (PD), etc.

However, in Shopify, the maximum number of product characteristics is three, and it can’t be changed even by writing custom code. However, the platform has numerous custom fields that can be tailored to the product’s specifics. To solve this, our experts offered to leverage this opportunity to solve the issue and made a template for all the extra parameters.

Honed SEO functionality

Based on the client’s request to enhance SEO capabilities of a new Shopify store, we’ve bolstered it with two additional paid SEO modules. One of them allowed the client to swiftly generate titles and descriptions for multiple dynamic pages using adaptable variables. For example, a variable “buy in France” following a product name in the admin panel, can be integrated across all or chosen pages automatically.

The other SEO module speeds up caching, preloading pages, etc., based on the analysis of user behavior.

Thanks to this upgrade, our client elevated their search engines’ rankings by three to five positions on average.

Going extra mile without upping the project’s budget

The client was interested in Shopify’s analytics capabilities. They could have chosen Shopify+ to get access to this functionality. Still, our development team came up with a more budget-friendly option – they found and installed a free sales and analytics module that provides the same ability to collect detailed data from Google Tag Manager, GA4, and Facebook.

Before

6-second website loading speed
Average session duration below 30 seconds
70% bounce rate
A mind-boggling amount of plugins to ensure basic ecommerce functionality
Difficulties of maintaining an outdated ecommerce Frankenstein

After

1-second website loading speed
Average session duration over two minutes
35% bounce rate
Off-the-shelf budget-friendly solution fine-tuned to meet the client’s requirements
Free access to detailed customer analytics
Seamless solution updates and maintenance covered by the platform’s support

Key features

Continuity

WordPress to Shopify migration and revamping the whole ecommerce solution didn’t cause any disruption to the client’s business operation flow.

Scalability

The new store, based on the specialized ecommerce platform, supports the client’s plans to scale beyond France.

Reliability

The client always has the latest vulnerability-free version of the solution without lifting their finger, all thanks to delegating the maintenance hassle to the ecommerce vendor.

Business value

x6 higher loading speed
Halved bounce rate
x4 longer time spent on page
64% boost in the number of pages visited per session
Free detailed analytics into customer behavior
Three to five positions higher search engine rankings

Client’s testimonial

Now, let’s here how the product owner talks the project’s results and the expected outcomes:

Cross-Browser Website Development For a US Marketing Agency

How developing and launching three websites on WordPress, Shopify, and Squarespace for a US-based marketing company led to a 46% boost in web traffic and a 22% ramp-up in loyal customer base, all while maintaining seamless operational continuity.

Home / Shopify

Challenge

Our customer is a typical problem-solver. Their team primarily deals with clients who have already tried digital marketing…but nothing magical happened – no leads, no sales – except for the marketing budget that ran out wondrously fast. Our customer’s team does a thorough research on the peculiarities of their client’s business, analyzes the arising problems and, finally, comes up with a perfectly calibrated plan on how to upgrade their client’s digital strategy. The next equally important step is to make this plan work. That’s why they were looking for a technical partner who would work as part of a large team of marketers and designers and whose expertise would make a substantial contribution to the common goal.

Task

The task was to create adaptive cross-browser websites using completely different CMS platforms according to clients’ specific needs.

Solution

When you are building a site using a CMS, you are effectively creating Lego pieces that editors then use to piece together their pages. This also forces developers to think about how to support different use success-stories and placements of functionality and content.

The main complexity of the project lay in the necessity to adapt really quickly to the constantly changing circumstances, which meant jumping from platform to platform, keeping pace and high quality. The use of different platforms [in its turn] was conditioned by a wide variety of sites and their specific features.

While working on the project we were dealing not only with well-known platforms but also with less popular ones, which had just started to compete with big players. However tempting it might be to follow the beaten track, you need to take the path that will lead you to your goal. And that’s exactly what we did, exploring the possibilities of different CMS.

Squarespace turned out to be definitely the best option in terms of templates. It caters to small or mid-sized businesses. It is not as customizable as, for example, WordPress, but it’s not lacking in any important functionalities.
For sure, WordPress is the leader for the online site builders. Around the world, countless companies rely on WordPress to keep their business up and running. The open-source nature of WordPress makes it a lot more flexible than Squarespace, but it can be a lot harder to use too.
Shopify is clearly one of the biggest and most popular platforms for ecommerce site building in the digital world. This elegant and easy-to-use platform comes with a range of customizable templates in both free and premium formats. There’s also plenty of easy integration with third-party apps. Shopify is particularly good for companies that want access to advanced functionality, like social media, customer service, dropshipping, and inventory management.

Our team’s slogan for this project was “we code what you need and even more”. Meticulously meeting all the customer’s requirements, we, nevertheless, didn’t miss a chance to see the room for improvement and offered more suitable options, such as using another slider or library.

At the end of the day, it was up to the customer whether to agree to the changes or not. But we always had an ace up our sleeve and were happy to use it.

Value

Thanks to this project, we proved to the customer and once again to ourselves that we can perform the task by one hundred percent. Some of the CMS we had to work with were completely unknown to us, but being proactive and navigating swiftly in a new environment is our jam. So we didn’t wallow on the surface and dived deep in the context straightaway. As a result, we created the websites that allow our customer’s clients to get maximum ROI from their sales strategy: impersonal “clicks” and “likes” turned into loyal customers that keep coming back.