Shopify Migration From Woocommerce with Site Design and Configuration

First Glance

The Mighty Luchador is a specialty retail shop located in the heart of Los Angeles founded by Carlo Flores in 2015. The shop is known for its eclectic and vibrant assortment of merchandise inspired by lucha libre wrestling culture. The store offers a wide range of products, including luchador figures, apparel and accessories. Carlo wanted an online store where customers could find the same great merchandise however this proved to be a bigger challenge then initially expected.

The Mighty Luchador recognized the need to elevate their online presence to match their fun in-store experience. As they aimed to grow their business, they ran into problems with their old Woocommerce website. The shop wouldn't properly load or provide a good shopping experience. There was no way for Carlo to grow his online business with an unreliable store. Sunrise Integration stepped in to help transition the digital storefront to a robust Shopify environment. The project included a site migration and custom theme design services. We set out to solve these problems and more.

The Challenge

When The Mighty Luchador reached out to Sunrise Integration about their store, the first obvious problem was the website performance. The site was plagued by slow loading times and frequent downtime. This obviously hindered sales as customers couldn't even load the site. During our initial assessment, the Woocommerce site struggled and completely failed to appear. We knew the site needed an immediate migration to a reliable platform like Shopify. The old site was in bad shape, so we didn't know what to expect behind the scenes. Would the data and product information be even worse? It was a challenge we have to overcome.

Gotta Make It Work Well

Our Growth & Retention team stepped-in and performed an analytical speed report using GTmetrix. GTmetrix is a tool that analyzes the performance of websites. It measures key aspects like page load time, page size, and the number of requests made. Using this service, we can better understand and optimize sites for better user experience. As expected, the old Mighty Luchador site received a "D" rating on GTmetrix (when it even loaded.) This is a very low performance score. These results made it clear that the shop was unable to grow on the old platform.

Gotta Make It Look Good

Tackling the speed issue was only the first challenge. The Mighty Luchador wanted a first-class design to match the unique branding of the brick and mortar location. The retail store has a fun, unique design that dazzles store goers. They wanted the online store to match the libre wrestling imagery. How could we bring this excitement to the Shopify site? This design is central to their brand, with bold colors, dramatic action shots and iconic characters. We needed to maintain the unique aesthetic while still ensuring fast loading times.

Store owner, Carlo, has a design background so it was important for our work to match his desired aesthetic. The key challenge was to balance high-quality bold images while keep the user experience in mind. This meant providing The Mighty Luchador with a fast and enjoyable experience for all users.

The Solution

Sunrise Integration addressed these challenges by starting with a full site migration to Shopify. We focused on product consistency and custom design services. We knew the previous Woocommerce site had major speed issues, so we worked on an optimized Shopify theme design. We wanted to recreate the unique design of the physical store while giving users access to the great merchandise.

Focus on Speed

Migrating the site from Woocommerce to Shopify was the first step in getting the required performance improvement. Our ecommerce design and development team loves Shopify because the sites are designed for speed. Shopify uses a global network of servers (CDN), to optimize load times regardless of user location. We knew the platform would immediately outperform the old site. The new Shopify site improved their GTmetrix score right out of the gate:

Even before our additional optimizations, the base Shopify site received a "B" from the GTmertix speed report. We knew it was only going to go up from there with our continued image and script optimizations. We were excited about the improved score as this means the site is performing faster, which directly impacts SEO and Google search rankings.

New Site Design

Our team collaborated closely with The Mighty Luchador to provide theme design and layout optimizations to match Carlo's vision. This iterative process ensured that the final design was not only visually appealing, but also aligned with his vision. We previewed designs and made site upgrades to match the brand. Our process involved providing regular updates to seek feedback to refine the design. This refinement involved optimizing images, implementing advanced coding techniques and tweaking the layout to make it more user-friendly. We knew that Carlo wanted a smooth navigation and speedy performance so we focused on delivering the best experience. After seeing how the poor performance of the old site affected sales, we didn't want to diminish the new user experience in any way.

Our frontend layout team used Shopify's Liquid scripting to add custom features to the theme. Custom animations and engaging user interfaces were created to enhance the user experience. We wanted to make the online store as lively as the physical store. Using Shopify Liquid, we crafted custom code that better highlighted products. The custom product pages were designed to include detailed descriptions, high-quality images, and user-friendly navigation.

Shopify gives our development team complete access to the theme code so we made even deeper updates. We optimized images, added custom Google fonts, employed Shopify lazy loading techniques, created dynamic product galleries, added interactive image sliders and streamlined the code to minimize load times. This allowed the site to maintain performance, without compromising on the cool visual elements. By focusing on both design and functionality, we created a site that looked amazing and provided an improved user experience. Each element was carefully coded to ensure performance.

The improved speed led to immediate sales with The Mighty Luchador reporting an increase within the first week. We expect the streamlined site will lead to even more sales as customers enjoy the new design and quick-loading site.

The Outcome

Sunrise Integration was excited to deliver a fast, great looking Shopify site to The Mighty Luchador. The result was a dynamic store that showcased The Mighty Luchador's unique products and provided a more reliable shopping experience. We leveraged Shopify's comprehensive suite of tools and features to supercharge the shop. The Mighty Luchador saw immediate sales after the Shopify migration, demonstrating the powerful impact of technical and design optimizations that lead to ecommerce success.

Upgrade to Shopify POS

Carlo, owner of The Mighty Luchador, stated how thrilled he is with the exceptional performance of the new Shopify store. Motivated by the online success, Carlo engaged Sunrise Integration to make the in-store migration to Shopify POS . This move unifies their commerce offering, allowing The Mighty Luchador to manage both online and in-store sales through a single platform. We're excited to have them on Shopify and look forward to adding even more great features!

We're excited about the future and confident that this unified system will further enhance their business growth and customer satisfaction.