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A large-scale ecommerce replatform and redesign that moved a fragmented WordPress + Shopify headless environment back toward a Shopify-centered commerce experience — while migrating 1,200+ articles and recipes, rebuilding roughly 60 product experiences, refreshing the brand, and restructuring GA4 and GTM so the business could finally trust its performance data.
Headless commerce had originally promised the business more flexibility and control.
In practice, that flexibility had introduced significant operational complexity.
The ecommerce experience was split across WordPress and Shopify, with different portions of the customer journey living in different environments. Routine updates often required technical involvement, content was distributed across a large ecosystem, and the fragmented architecture made it difficult for the business to get a clean view of storefront performance.
Analytics had become particularly challenging.
Because traffic moved through the headless portion of the experience before reaching Shopify, Shopify could not see the full customer journey. Native traffic and conversion reporting was therefore incomplete.
GA4 was being used to bridge that gap, but the implementation had become overly complex. Multiple GA4 instances existed across the experience, events were firing more than once, and duplicated tracking was inflating portions of the reporting.
The business was making decisions from data it could not fully trust.
At the same time, the brand was preparing for a broader transformation. The website needed a refreshed design, products were being rebranded, approximately 1,200 articles and recipes needed to be migrated, and roughly 60 SKUs required complete product-page updates.
This wasn't simply a website redesign.
It was a full ecommerce transformation touching development, design, content, merchandising, analytics, SEO, and day-to-day operations.
The replatform created an opportunity to solve multiple problems at once.
Instead of treating the project as a visual redesign alone, the team could use the migration to bring more of the commerce experience back toward Shopify, rethink how products were presented, modernize the brand experience, preserve years of editorial content, and rebuild the measurement framework behind the business.
The storefront also needed to become more product-forward.
The previous experience leaned heavily into content, while the new website needed to better balance education, brand authority, product discovery, and commerce.
Most importantly, the new experience needed to work for more than the customer.
It needed to work for the internal teams responsible for ecommerce, marketing, merchandising, analytics, content, and ongoing website operations.
By moving away from a fragmented WordPress + Shopify headless setup and centralizing more of the customer journey around Shopify, the business could create a more manageable ecommerce foundation.
Combining that transition with a redesigned storefront, stronger product merchandising, structured QA, and a rebuilt GA4 and GTM implementation would give the organization a website that was easier to operate, easier to measure, and better aligned with the needs of a growing ecommerce brand.
The project was managed as several interconnected workstreams rather than a traditional website redesign.
The internal development team handled the technical implementation of the storefront, while my role focused on the business and customer experience side of the migration.
I collaborated on wireframes and design direction, helped shape a more product-forward ecommerce experience, supported the rebuild of product and page content, spearheaded QA across the new storefront, worked through the migration of a large editorial library, and helped validate the analytics infrastructure behind the new experience.
The resulting environment brought more of the commerce experience back toward Shopify while maintaining a hybrid development workflow using GitHub alongside Vue and React components.
The existing WordPress + Shopify headless setup had introduced significant operational overhead.
The migration brought more of the customer journey back into Shopify while maintaining a hybrid architecture that utilized GitHub, Vue, and React for portions of the frontend experience.
Because development, design, content, products, analytics, and branding were all changing at the same time, the migration required close coordination across multiple teams.
The challenge wasn't simply getting the new website live.
It was making sure the underlying business could continue operating throughout the transition.
The replatform happened alongside a broader brand refresh.
I collaborated with the team on wireframes, page structure, customer experience, and design decisions as the new storefront took shape.
A major goal was making the website more product-forward.
Products, collections, educational content, and brand authority needed to work together more intentionally so the website functioned as an ecommerce destination rather than primarily as a content platform with commerce attached to it.
Approximately 60 SKUs were undergoing a complete refresh at the same time as the site migration.
Products required updated imagery, refreshed branding, revised product information, and rebuilt PDP experiences within the new storefront.
Because the product changes were tied closely to the broader launch, the catalog rebuild happened under a compressed timeline.
A major portion of the product migration was completed during an intensive two-day push, rapidly entering and validating product data, imagery, content, and page configurations across the new experience.
Speed mattered, but accuracy mattered more.
The products needed to launch with the correct information, creative, merchandising, and customer experience while the larger replatform was still moving forward.
The existing site contained a large editorial library representing years of organic content and brand equity.
Approximately 1,200 articles and recipes needed to be migrated into the new environment.
Preserving that content was critical.
The migration needed to maintain a usable customer experience while protecting the value of a large educational ecosystem that supported organic search, customer education, and brand authority.
This extended the project far beyond the storefront itself.
The migration touched the broader content operation behind the ecommerce business.
With so many moving pieces, QA became a major workstream rather than a final pre-launch checklist.
I owned the ecommerce QA process throughout the project.
The storefront was tested across desktop and mobile experiences as well as major browsers including Chrome and Safari.
Testing covered page layouts, navigation, product experiences, responsive behavior, functionality, content, links, merchandising, tracking, and complete customer journeys.
Issues were documented through detailed development tickets outlining the bug, required changes, and expected behavior.
I also worked directly with the development team's project manager to review open issues, track progress, clarify requirements, retest completed work, and manage tickets through resolution.
The goal wasn't simply to identify visual bugs.
It was to make sure the rebuilt website functioned as a complete ecommerce experience.
The previous headless architecture made performance measurement unnecessarily difficult.
Traffic moved between different parts of the customer experience before reaching Shopify, meaning Shopify could not see the complete customer journey.
As a result, native traffic and conversion-rate reporting was incomplete.
GA4 was intended to bridge that gap, but the tracking implementation had accumulated its own problems.
Multiple GA4 instances existed across the experience, tracking logic had become overly complex, and some events were firing more than once.
That duplication made portions of performance reporting appear stronger than they actually were and reduced confidence in the data being used to make business decisions.
Following the launch, we reworked the Google Tag Manager and GA4 implementation, validated key ecommerce events, removed duplicate tracking, and simplified the measurement approach.
With more of the customer journey now centered around Shopify, the team could also begin using Shopify's native reporting as an additional source of truth.
The result was a significantly cleaner measurement foundation and greater confidence in the metrics being used to evaluate ecommerce performance.
The project transformed much more than the appearance of the website.
The business moved away from a fragmented WordPress + Shopify headless experience and toward a more centralized Shopify commerce environment.
Approximately 1,200 articles and recipes were migrated, roughly 60 product experiences were rebuilt around refreshed branding, the storefront became more product-forward, and the analytics implementation was restructured so the business could more accurately understand customer behavior and ecommerce performance.
The project also reinforced an important lesson about ecommerce architecture:
More flexibility does not automatically create a better operating model.
Complexity has a cost.
The strongest commerce architecture is not necessarily the one with the most technology behind it. It is the one that provides enough flexibility for the customer experience while still allowing the business to merchandise, measure, iterate, and operate effectively.