A faster shop, with no retraining for the team

The result

The Embroidery Shed's customers get a faster shop built around what it sells. On Google's mobile speed test the shop page went from 88 to 99 out of 100, and the homepage scores 100.

Ross, who runs the business with founder Vikki Chester, no longer spends his time on hacks, downtime and one-off fixes. Twenty-one kinds of order are placed and checked automatically, and we have proved the whole shop can be restored from backup in under two and a half hours. No release goes live without that proof being recent.

The team still manages products, orders and fulfilment exactly as it did before, with no retraining.

We also put AI to work in the business itself, taking routine day-to-day jobs off the team.

"We're doing more sales and making more money, whilst sleeping easier at night."

Ross, The Embroidery Shed

"I had spent far too much time battling plugins, visual editors, and one-off fixes just to keep the store running. We still manage products and orders in the same familiar WooCommerce back office, but the shop itself is faster, clearer, and properly engineered. I can sleep easier knowing the important bits have been taken care of."

Ross, The Embroidery Shed

The problem

The Embroidery Shed is a Chesterfield business that has embroidered workwear since 2017. The business was doing well. The website was holding it back.

Ross was spending time and energy he did not have on hacks, downtime, slowness, and a shop that never looked the way he wanted the brand to be seen. Years of well-meant add-ons had piled up behind it, and some of them were quietly stopping the site from being fast. There was also an old hack that predated the current hosting and had woken up.

Changing platform would have meant migrating the business and retraining a team that already knew how it wanted to run products, orders and fulfilment. The back office was not the part that needed replacing.

What we did

We kept the engine and replaced the bodywork. Max calls it the mullet shop: custom in the front, Woo in the back. Customers see a new, purpose-built shop. The team logs into the same WooCommerce admin to manage products, orders, VAT, shipping and fulfilment.

We rebuilt the embroidery ordering journey (colours, sizes, decorations, logo upload), added search that understands what people mean, gave the business its own privacy-friendly analytics, locked down the hosting, and cleaned up the old hack as a separate piece of work.

For the technical reader:

• 45 active plugins down to 5. Two page builders, two SEO plugins and two security suites are gone. What remains is WooCommerce, a caching plugin, Stripe and two small plugins we wrote. Every third-party plugin is locked to a checked version, and about 84 unused database tables were removed. One custom plugin had been setting a cookie on every page, which switched off caching site-wide.
• Built around the real catalogue: 23,006 products and variations, garment colour groups, size rules, quantity price tiers, and VAT shown differently for trade and public customers.
• Ordering journey in the shop's own code, moved out of the most fragile plugin, with each customer's artwork isolated from every other session.
• Search. A search for "something warm for the lads outside" finds fleeces. If the smart part is unavailable it falls back to keyword search, and it runs separately from the admin so an admin update cannot break it.
• Analytics with no cookies and no personal identifiers, respecting browser privacy settings and deleting data after ninety days. They report traffic, channels and customer lifetime value from real orders, with AI assistants shown as their own source of visitors.
• Hosting with no public front door. Nothing on the server accepts connections from the open internet; visitors come through Cloudflare, and the admin sits behind a login gate before WordPress is reached. WordPress cannot change its own files. Each release is checked as it goes live and rolls back automatically if something is wrong.
• Speed, lab measurements. Largest contentful paint on the shop page fell from 3.81s to 2.15s. Total blocking time fell from 1,340ms to 30ms after removing third-party scripts. Cached pages return in 36–57ms, and a product category that took 306ms loads in about 2ms from cache.
• 21 order types tested automatically against a copy of the real shop: standard, zero-rated and mixed VAT baskets, orders under, at and over £100 in both VAT display modes, ten coupon types, collection and delivery, a seven-item bundle with uploaded artwork, and a repeated checkout to prove an order cannot be placed twice. Seven order emails are checked on the same run.
• Disaster recovery proved. A full backup was restored into a separate environment and checked file by file: 164,736 uploaded files (3.13 GB), no corrupted images, and every database check passing, in two hours and twenty-seven minutes. A release cannot go live unless that test is recent.

Ross keeps WooCommerce, the business data, the hosting and the code. The work continues: mobile product pages are being tuned, and recovering the site's reputation after the old hack takes longer than the clean-up itself.

Not every shop needs this kind of rebuild. We have written about when rebuilding your WooCommerce shop is worth it. If your shop takes more looking after than it earns, read about how we make online shops faster or send us your shop's address.