# Redesigning a live shop without stopping sales

> A fashion retailer wanted to modernise its theme and checkout without ever interrupting sales in progress.

- Source canonique : [https://allaux.fr/en/realisations/refonte-ecommerce-pret-a-porter](https://allaux.fr/en/realisations/refonte-ecommerce-pret-a-porter)
- Langue : EN
- Dernière mise à jour : 2026-09-30

## 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

1. **Splitting the redesign scope** — Splitting the site into zones that could be redesigned independently: homepage, category listings, product page, checkout.
2. **Building on a separate environment** — Each section was built and tested on a staging environment before going live, using real data to check behaviour.
3. **Staged rollout** — Progressive go-live, one validated section after another, monitoring sales metrics and checkout behaviour after each step.
4. **Rollback plan** — Every deployment came with the ability to revert quickly to the previous version if an issue was spotted after going live.

## Result

> The shop was fully modernised with no interruption to sales and no lasting regression detected on the checkout during the redesign period.

## FAQ

### Why not redesign the whole site in one go?

A global switch maximises the risk: an unforeseen regression then hits the whole site at once. A staged approach limits the impact of each change and makes diagnosing a problem easier.

### Was SEO affected by the redesign?

The staged rollout made it possible to check, section by section, that URLs and markup stayed consistent before moving on, rather than discovering a site-wide problem afterwards.

### How long does a redesign like this take?

It depends on how many sections need redesigning and the pace of validation wanted between each step; a staged approach generally takes longer in calendar time than a single switch, in exchange for a much lower risk.

### What happens if an issue is spotted after a step?

The rollback plan built into every deployment allows a quick return to the previous version while the issue is fixed, without leaving the checkout degraded in production.