Platform migration & SEO for ecommerce site

We worked for an online vape shop that is one of the UK’s most established online vape retailers, stocking a vast range of e-liquids, vape kits, pods, and accessories across hundreds of brands.

Built on a commitment to quality products and strong customer service, the business had developed a loyal customer base and a catalogue that had grown significantly over the years.

When the vape shop approached FitPixels, they were in a difficult position. Their store was live and trading, but the platform they were on was holding them back. Locked into a Shopify setup by developers who wouldn’t grant full access, they couldn’t make changes independently, couldn’t see all of their store data, and couldn’t modify and make changes to their store quickly. They needed a partner who could migrate them to a Woocommerce store where they could have full control to develop and grow the store in partnership with a developer they could trust to be transparent.

The vape shop had outgrown its Shopify.

Their development team had retained control of the back end, leaving the business without full access to their own data and unable to make many of the changes they needed. This kind of locked-in arrangement is sadly common, and the consequences include limited visibility into analytics, dependence on costly third-party developers for routine updates, and an inability to respond quickly to changes in the market.

Beyond the platform problem, the store itself had issues that were limiting performance. With over ten thousand products in the catalogue, navigation had become unwieldy, and customers were not being guided towards the best or highest-margin products. Product pages were in poor shape with descriptions that were too long, inconsistently formatted, and often in the wrong fields, which made the browsing experience feel cluttered and affected how well pages ranked in search. Site speed had also deteriorated under the weight of the product catalogue, which was impacting both user experience and search performance.

There were also clear opportunities for email marketing that hadn’t been explored. These are exactly the kinds of challenges we tackle regularly for e-commerce clients. A large catalogue brings real complexity in migration, navigation design, SEO, and the way individual product pages are structured. Getting it right requires both technical depth and genuine experience.

Our starting point was getting the vape shop off a platform they didn’t control and onto one they did.

Platform migration to WooCommerce

We moved the entire store from Shopify to WooCommerce, migrating a product library of over ten thousand items in the process. Migrations at this scale require careful planning to preserve data integrity, URL structures, and SEO equity built up over years of trading. The move gave the vape shop full ownership of their platform, complete access to their store data, and the flexibility to develop the site on their own terms going forward.

Speed and navigation improvements

With ten thousand products, performance and discoverability go hand in hand. We made substantial improvements to site speed, ensuring the store loaded quickly regardless of catalogue depth. Navigation was restructured to make it easier for customers to browse and search by category, brand, flavour, and product type. This helped reduce the friction between landing on the site and finding the right product. The result was a noticeably cleaner, faster, and easier shopping experience.

SEO for key products and pages

We identified the highest-value products and category pages and optimised them for search, working through meta titles, descriptions, and on-page content to bring them in line with what their target customers were actually searching for. Combined with the site speed improvements and the platform migration, this drove a significant uplift in organic traffic and contributed big increases in revenue to over £400k/month.

Product page and content improvements

Across the catalogue, product descriptions were inconsistent. They were often too long, poorly structured, and placed in the wrong fields. Drawing on our experience with e-commerce design and conversion optimisation, we worked through the product library to tidy descriptions, standardise formatting, and ensure each page was structured to support both usability and search performance. Cleaner product pages make it easier for customers to make decisions, and that translates directly into conversion rates.

Competitor analysis and feature development

We carried out structured research into competitor sites to identify features that were working well in the market and were absent from the vape shop store. Recommended products and related products functionality were high on the list as they were identified both as features that keep customers engaged and increase average order value. We worked with our development team to implement these features with lightweight, performance-conscious code, so the benefits came without any cost to site speed.

Email marketing and automated flows

With the store performing well on-site, we turned our attention to what happened after a purchase. We built out automated email follow-up sequences and ran A/B tests across key email flows to identify what resonated best with the vape shop’s audience. The results were clear, email automation alone added approximately ten per cent to revenue, with further gains realised as testing continued.

Design and branding refresh

To round out the project, we updated imagery and visual branding throughout the site, replacing dated assets with a more contemporary look that better reflected where the vaping market had moved and gave the store a more modern, credible feel. The project delivered results that speak for themselves: revenue more than doubled, organic traffic grew substantially, and the vape shop now operates on a platform they fully own and control with the data, flexibility, and functionality to keep growing on their own terms. Interested in what we can do for your e-commerce store? Contact us.

How we got there