Dive behind the scenes of our very first ecommerce project for our new-for-2025 website rebuild service.
Karakorum is an online store that works with artisans and crafters from across the world to bring wonderful, ethical decor & gifts to your home.
We've been collaborating with Karakorum for a few years now with content, consulting, our membership, edits, and workshops - and the website had made some incredible strides.
Unfortunately, it also suffered with some technical challenges. The previous site was also a WordPress build using our go-to page builder, Elementor Pro - but it was stuck using the very dated theme of Twenty Seventeen.
This was causing performance issues and also prevented the independent online store from embracing more modern ecommerce features - so it was time to rebuild from the ground up.
Although this website rebuild was primarily motivated by performance improvements and modernisation, we also took the opportunity to refine the website design and build in as many extra SEO wins as possible.
A small update was adding in a sans-serif type face to balance the more characterful serif, which allows the emphasis to stay on the page & product content rather than functional features like buttons and filters.
The previous website had been DIYed over a number of years, which meant inconsistencies across pages and templates. Now, every page looks as good as the home page - welcoming, warm, and optimised for shopping.
A suite of custom product fields allows Karakorum to beautifully display their product information without resorting to a cumbersome page-long essay.
This rich product set up not only makes the content more readable and digestible, but allows the store to seize the SEO benefits that come with helpful, valuable content.
Fun tidbit - this whole project originally started with the task of adding mega menus to the Karakorum website. On the previous website, this could have been a much fiddlier and design-compromised update.
However, when upgraded to a full website rebuild - we were able to create a small collection of mega menu templates, including dynamic product feeds that pull in relevant products, that can also be filtered by qualities like newest, best sellers, and gifting picks.
Not just category & price; Karakorum shoppers can now filter their archives using totally custom taxonomies - including the country of origin for each product.
Upgrading to a new, sleek gift card system meant popping together new graphics. This is a really, really small detail - but you might recognise the pattern background of this gift card image as a diced up Karakorum logo!
One of the most impressive factors of this project was the incredible delivery time. With a project start date on 24th September 2025, the website go-live happened on Monday 3rd November - a total of 40 days to completely rebuild, refresh, and refine the ecommerce website from the ground up.
This efficient build also allowed us to maximise the time the website was live before the Christmas shopping peak - giving the content more time to be discovered and indexed by Google.
Organic reach stats are looking good already, with our first 28 days post-launch netting 27% more clicks from Google searches compared to the same period in 2024.
Get in touch with our independent Bristolian website design company for a cheerful & very websitey chat.
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