The Problem
This Ontario retailer had been in business for over a decade. Their reputation was strong. Their product was solid. But their website was quietly costing them customers every single day.
The site was built on a legacy platform that hadn't seen a meaningful update in four years. It wasn't mobile-responsive — a significant problem when over 60% of their traffic was arriving on phones. Page load times were slow. There was no SEO foundation: no schema markup, no proper meta tags, no Google Analytics. And critically, there was no way for a visitor to actually buy anything online.
Competitors with inferior products had newer, faster websites and were winning Google searches this brand should have owned. The owner knew it. He just didn't know where to start.
The Brief: Build a website that works as hard as the business does. Mobile-first. Optimized. With a real online store.
What We Built
We started with a one-week discovery sprint. Brand brief, competitive audit, sitemap, and user journey mapping — before a single pixel was designed. That clarity meant every decision downstream had a rationale, and the client was never surprised by direction changes.
The full scope:
- Complete rebuild on Next.js — server-side rendering for speed and crawlability
- Mobile-first UI across 10 pages — designed to convert on every screen size
- Brand refresh — new color system, typography, and photography direction aligned with their premium positioning
- SEO foundation built in from day one: schema markup (LocalBusiness, Product), meta tags, XML sitemap, Google Analytics 4 + Google Search Console integration
- E-commerce integration — full product catalogue with cart, checkout, and inventory management
- Lead capture system — email opt-in with segmented welcome sequence
- 30-day post-launch support — monitoring, bug fixes, and initial SEO performance review
8 weeks. Discovery to live.
The Results
"We've had more inbound inquiries in the last 90 days than in the previous year combined."
| Metric | Before | After (90 Days) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic search traffic | Baseline | 3× baseline | +200% |
| Mobile session duration | Baseline | +42% | +42% |
| Online revenue | $0 | Live store | First sales in 14 days |
| Bounce rate (mobile) | High | Reduced significantly | Improved |
Additional outcomes:
- Online store went live on schedule — within the 8-week window
- Client enrolled in a monthly maintenance and SEO retainer immediately post-launch
- Within 90 days, the site was ranking on page 1 for 3 local search terms they had previously had zero visibility on
Why It Worked
This wasn't a web build project. It was a business growth project that happened to produce a website.
The discovery phase was non-negotiable. Before any design work started, we answered three questions: Who is this site for? What do we need them to do? What would make them trust you enough to do it? Every design decision, every headline, every CTA traced back to those answers.
Because we built on Next.js with SEO baked into the architecture — not bolted on as an afterthought — Google could index and rank the new site faster than a traditional CMS migration.
And because we handled the technical lift entirely in-house (design, development, SEO, e-commerce), the client never had to manage multiple vendors or version-control their own project.