Artisan Coffee Co. arrived with a problem we see often: a beautiful brand, a loyal local following, and a website that was actively working against them. Their WooCommerce store — bloated with plugins, slow to load, and architecturally mismatched with their growth ambitions — was throttling their ability to compete online.
The brief was straightforward in scope but demanding in execution: migrate to a modern, performant stack without dropping a single ranking. Ninety days later, organic traffic was up 240%.
The Problem: WooCommerce Was the Bottleneck
Artisan Coffee Co.'s existing store ran on WordPress 6.4 with WooCommerce and a premium theme layered on top. On the surface it looked polished. Beneath it, the architecture was fragile. A technical audit revealed 23 active plugins, a Time to First Byte (TTFB) of 1.8 seconds, and a Lighthouse performance score of 41 — well below the threshold where Google's algorithms begin penalising a site in search rankings.
Core Web Vitals were failing across the board. The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) was clocking in at 5.2 seconds on mobile — almost three times the "good" threshold of 2.5s. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) was 0.28, meaning the page was visually unstable as it loaded, a frustrating experience that was driving bounce rates up and conversion rates down.
The plugin architecture was also a security liability. Three plugins had known CVEs that had been unpatched for over six months. Every plugin update introduced a regression risk. The team was spending more time maintaining the platform than growing the business.
The Solution: Headless Shopify Architecture
After evaluating several options — including a managed Shopify theme, a Webflow + Shopify integration, and a full custom Next.js storefront — we recommended a Headless Shopify implementation using Shopify's Storefront API. Here's the reasoning:
- Shopify handles all commerce complexity: inventory, payments, fulfilment, tax — battle-tested infrastructure that WooCommerce plugins were approximating poorly.
- Decoupling the frontend gives complete control over performance. No theme constraints. No plugin overhead. Pure, semantic HTML output.
- The Storefront API provides a stable GraphQL surface that is independent of Shopify's own UI changes — future-proofing the investment.
- Netlify edge deployment gives sub-100ms TTFB globally, a structural performance advantage WooCommerce on shared hosting cannot match.
Migration Execution
A migration of this nature is as much a logistics operation as a development one. We structured the work across four phases, running in parallel where possible to compress the timeline.
SEO Archaeology
Complete crawl of the existing site using Screaming Frog. Every URL, its indexed status, its inbound link equity, and its search ranking mapped into a master migration spreadsheet. 847 unique URLs catalogued. 312 identified as ranking or link-carrying assets requiring 301 redirects.
Data Migration
Product catalogue (186 SKUs), customer accounts, historical order data, and subscription data migrated to Shopify via custom Python scripts. Product metafields mapped to preserve all SEO-relevant custom fields. Zero data loss validated against source database.
Frontend Build
Six-week development sprint. Core pages — home, collection, product, cart, checkout — built against a component-based design system. Structured data (Schema.org Product, BreadcrumbList, Organisation) implemented on all templates. Image pipeline: next/image with WebP conversion, lazy loading, and explicit width/height attributes to eliminate CLS.
Launch & Validation
Staged launch with DNS cutover at low-traffic window (02:00 Monday). Immediate post-launch crawl to verify all 312 redirects resolving correctly. Google Search Console property verified and sitemap submitted within 30 minutes of go-live. Lighthouse CI integrated into deployment pipeline to prevent future regressions.
"We didn't want just a faster site — we wanted an unfair competitive advantage. Herald delivered an infrastructure that our competitors simply cannot match on their current platforms."— Founder, Artisan Coffee Co.
The SEO Preservation Protocol
The biggest risk in any platform migration is losing accumulated search equity — the years of backlinks, crawl budget, and ranking signals associated with existing URLs. We treat this with the same seriousness as data integrity.
Every one of the 312 redirect mappings was validated in a staging environment before go-live using a custom validation script that confirmed each source URL returned a 301 with the correct destination. We did not rely on catch-all redirect rules; each mapping was explicit and individually verified.
301 redirect validation — every mapping explicitly verified pre-launch.
Beyond redirects, we ensured canonical tags, hreflang attributes (where applicable), and Open Graph metadata were correctly templated across all page types before any content was indexed on the new domain. Google Search Console data from the legacy property was used to prioritise crawl budget allocation in the new sitemap structure.
Results After 90 Days
The results surpassed the client brief. Organic traffic grew 240% within the first 90 days — a combination of the performance uplift, preserved link equity, and the improved crawlability of the new site architecture allowing Google to index previously hidden product pages.
Lessons Learned
- Start the SEO crawl on day one. The redirect mapping is always more complex than expected, and discovering 300+ URLs two weeks before launch is a project risk. Crawl early, map early.
- Headless is not always the right answer. For this client, the commerce complexity and traffic volume justified it. For a 10-product store with modest traffic, a well-configured Shopify theme would perform adequately without the overhead.
- Lighthouse CI in the pipeline is non-negotiable. Performance regressions introduced by content editors or future developers need to be caught automatically, not in a quarterly audit.
- The first 48 hours post-launch are critical. Real-time monitoring of Google Search Console's Index Coverage report and crawl stats allowed us to catch and resolve two redirect edge-cases within hours of going live.
If your current platform is holding your growth back, the answer is rarely to add more plugins. Sometimes the most strategic move is architectural — rebuilding on infrastructure that removes friction at every layer. Start a conversation with us to discuss whether a migration makes sense for your business.