We built a new Shopify store for a 2,000-product pet retailer in just six weeks.

We started with discovery: how MutzNutz runs day to day, what the new store had to do, and which features mattered most to them.

With those requirements written down, we proposed the premium Shopify theme that suited them best and used it as the foundation for the build. Starting from a maintained theme meant far less custom code to look after than the old site carried.

MutzNutz shared examples of stores they liked. We used those as the brief and adapted the theme's layout, color palette and page formats to match.

The old site gave a first-time visitor very little to go on, so trust was part of the design from the start:

• •An About page that introduces the founder, photo included
• •A stores page listing each brick-and-mortar location with its hours, phone number and Google Maps directions
• •A reviews system that collects feedback from real customers

We also gave discounted products a landing page of their own, so current offers are easy to find.

The hardest part of the project was the sheer volume. More than 2,000 products had to move across with their images and descriptions, and the store now has 133 collections.

At that scale, one small import error repeats itself across hundreds of products. To prevent that we built a custom CSV file for the import, so each product, image and description landed in Shopify where it belonged.

We also imported all past orders from WooCommerce. MutzNutz kept its full order history and customer contact details, with nothing stranded on the old platform. The team can still look up a past order or reach a returning customer from inside Shopify.

A platform change is one of the riskiest moments for a store's organic traffic, because WooCommerce and Shopify structure their URLs differently. By default WooCommerce serves products under /product/ and categories under /product-category/, while Shopify uses /products/ and /collections/.

That meant the addresses Google already knew were about to change. Without a redirect, each old address would send shoppers and search engines to an error page.

Crawls and redirect mapping

We crawled both sites with Screaming Frog ahead of launch and mapped each old URL to its new equivalent. That produced over 1,175 redirects.

Senior review

The complete migration plan was reviewed by our senior SEO specialists. The switch only went ahead after their final approval.

Checks before and after

We ran pre-migration checks before the switch and post-migration checks right after it, so any problem would be caught early instead of showing up in the rankings weeks later.

Beyond the essentials of payment gateways and inventory, we set up:

• •A custom booking page for dog grooming, so customers can book an appointment on the same site where they buy their pet food
• •Subscriptions for recurring orders of pet food
• •An affiliate program landing page
• •An AI chatbot that helps shoppers find products

The grooming booking page is the piece we are proudest of. It adds a bookable service to an ecommerce store, which took custom work on top of the theme.

A store with no measurement is hard to improve. We connected Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console, and linked the store to Google Ads.

We also launched an email marketing platform and installed a system for gathering customer reviews.

We made the switch in December 2024, at night, when traffic to the store was at its lowest. That kept the changeover away from the hours when most customers shop, to avoid losing sales.

Once the new store was live, we worked through the post-migration checks from the SEO plan.