Redesigning a live shop without stopping sales
A fashion retailer wanted to modernise its theme and checkout without ever interrupting sales in progress.
The context
The shop ran on an ageing theme, poorly suited to mobile browsing even though mobile accounted for most of the traffic. A full redesign was needed, but the shop stayed active and generating orders throughout the project: switching abruptly to a new theme on a given day was out of the question, with the risk of discovering regressions in production on a checkout that had to keep working without interruption.
The approach taken was therefore to roll out the redesign progressively, section by section, rather than in a single global switch.
What I did
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Splitting the redesign scope
Splitting the site into zones that could be redesigned independently: homepage, category listings, product page, checkout.
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Building on a separate environment
Each section was built and tested on a staging environment before going live, using real data to check behaviour.
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Staged rollout
Progressive go-live, one validated section after another, monitoring sales metrics and checkout behaviour after each step.
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Rollback plan
Every deployment came with the ability to revert quickly to the previous version if an issue was spotted after going live.
Frequently asked questions
Why not redesign the whole site in one go?
Was SEO affected by the redesign?
How long does a redesign like this take?
What happens if an issue is spotted after a step?
Describe your need in one minute
A few targeted questions so I can reply with an estimate rather than another questionnaire.