Acme Retail — WooCommerce Rebuild
Rebuilt a legacy WooCommerce store from the ground up with a custom lightweight theme, Redis caching, and consolidated plugin code. 3.2x faster checkout, 40% conversion lift.
The problem they were solving
Legacy WooCommerce store from 2018 was crashing weekly. Page load 6.4s on average. Cart abandonment sat at 82%. Owners were considering a full platform migration to Shopify Plus, which would have taken 6+ months and risked SEO.
How I approached it
Instead of migration, rebuilt on modern WooCommerce foundation. Custom lightweight theme, no page builder. Redis object cache. Rewrote 40+ third-party plugins as focused custom code. Kept every URL and meta identical, so SEO ranking transferred cleanly.
By the numbers
Overview
Acme Retail's legacy WooCommerce store had grown organically over five years and was struggling with slow load times, a clunky checkout flow, and abandoned cart rates well above industry averages. The site needed a complete rebuild to modern standards while migrating all existing customer and order data.
The challenge
Load times were pushing 8+ seconds on mobile, driving away 60% of prospective buyers before the homepage even finished rendering. The checkout took 5 steps with a mandatory account creation gate that killed conversions.
The solution
Full theme rewrite from scratch with a mobile-first approach, one-page checkout with guest option, Redis object caching, and LiteSpeed page caching with edge-side includes for personalized content.
Key deliverables
- Custom WordPress theme built from scratch
- Streamlined 1-page checkout with Stripe
- LiteSpeed + Redis performance stack
- Migration of 12,000+ customer records
- Zero downtime deployment
Results
Within 60 days of launch, conversion rate lifted 40%, PageSpeed jumped from 42 to 92, and organic search traffic increased 35% year-over-year.
