Migrating soy candle brand from WooCommerce to Shopify

Clean Slate’s ecommerce website (developed using WordPress and WooCommerce) was seriously slow (it took up to 27 seconds to load on mobile), leading to a low conversion rate and a high bounce rate. The average checkout time was over five minutes, more than double the industry average of two and a half minutes. This resulted in many customers abandoning their carts - adding products to their cart but not completing the checkout process.

Additionally, Clean Slate’s clunky website design wasn’t aligned with its sleek and minimalistic product design.

Clean Slate wasn’t confident that their existing ecommerce website would help them achieve their brand’s growth targets, so they reached out to our team to see how we could help.

As a fast-growing brand, Clean Slate needed an ecommerce website that could facilitate its growth trajectory. Shopify provides them with a world-class ecommerce platform for an affordable monthly cost. We decided to migrate Clean from WordPress to Shopify.

Our goal was to design and build a minimalistic, easy-to-use website that emphasized Clean Slate’s product imagery and photos from its Instagram feed.

After conducting two discovery workshops with the Clean Slate team, we decided that migrating from WordPress to Shopify would deliver the highest return on investment.

A huge benefit of using Shopify (over WordPress) for ecommerce is that Shopify offers a lot of out-of-the-box functionality. This same functionality requires lots of plugins on WordPress. Something as simple as creating coupon codes (discounts) requires a plugin on WordPress. Each additional plugin or app installed on your website will slow down your website.

Our two main priorities for any platform migration are to 1) migrate all existing product, order, and customer data and 2) do it with zero downtime. We seamlessly migrated Clean Slate’s store data from WordPress to Shopify, so their team wouldn’t be starting from scratch.

Our migration coincided with the launch of two new product collections for Clean Slate - gift cards and discovery bags - so we set up these collections too.

Then, we designed and developed a clean, minimalistic website on Shopify. Clean Slate has beautiful product photography, so we focused on making the website as visual as possible to showcase its candles.

To keep its ecommerce website looking fresh, we added an Instagram feed to key pages (such as the Home page), and we set up a product reviews app (Judge.me) to the Product pages to build social proof.

We improved the checkout time by availing of Shopify’s streamlined checkout pages, leading to an increased conversion rate.

We set up Klaviyo email marketing for Clean Slate to automatically send out emails to shoppers who abandon their carts, and this helps Clean Slate turn more of these shoppers into customers. Clean Slate also uses email marketing to keep its customer base engaged by sending regular email campaigns.

Clean Slate made a long-term investment in us in migrating from WordPress to Shopify, and they’ve reaped the rewards within the first six months of launching: its ecommerce conversion rate has increased by 40%.

Furthermore, we sped up the checkout process, and customers now spend an average of 2 minutes 15 seconds checking out (an improvement of more than 50%).

Nicole and Michael, Clean Slate’s co-founders, recently announced an expansion by opening a new, larger warehouse, and they’re delighted to have their ecommerce website ready to handle the increased sales volume!