The background
VuFold are a UK based family run business specialising in the manufacture and sale of Bi-folding doors. The business has been designing and manufacturing wooden doors and door systems since 1982.
Before coming to Fisheye, their site ran on Magento 1 Open Source but they wanted to replace their solution with a new build on Magento 2, using the new Hyvä Themes frontend. There were a number of key objectives to the project, including:
Functionality
The new solution should retain or improve upon all existing functionality
Simplify
Wherever possible simplifying the technology and administration
Stability
Remove blockers/issues caused wherever they are identified
Performance
To improve site performance and speed wherever possible
UX
Deliver clear improvements to the user experience and improve the customer journey
Achieving goals
Fisheye launched VuFold in June 2022 after migrating an already successful and performant website to Magento 2, including upgrading the UX to best practice. The build utilised a highly bespoke and fast platform, Hyvä Themes, which has resulted in an incredibly lean, and therefore fast, storefront experience. This allowed us to retain the existing high level of performance whilst also providing a new and modern design/UX despite the sheer vastness and complexity of the site.
The new UX features redesigned menus for both desktop and mobile, adding rich content for desktop and providing an easy to use ‘drill down’ on mobile; implemented an improved search solution and implemented our in-house checkout solution as well as simplifying delivery choices and language - amongst other things!
We’ve also made the most of the lifestyle imagery the merchant had available and better highlighted the product reviews and other USPs to build trust across the site. This, in turn, has allowed us to reduce duplication on the product listing (category) pages, provide quicker navigation, standardise and streamline the ‘configure and buy’ section and improve admin management for the product catalogue to streamline adding new products and placing admin orders.
Revitalising the customer experience and optimising every step of the purchase flow has greatly improved engagement, conversion and revenue.
The results
Hyvä Themes delivers blazing fast performance, quicker development times, and a decrease in maintenance overheads. From the performance of this site so far, it isn’t disappointing :
> Reduced the average time to first byte (server response time) to under 100ms for all key pages.
> Retained existing core web vitals metrics.
> Reduced the average number of requests on a page by a third and the overall page load (i.e. all requests) by half.
Key info
Heavy customisation of Magento’s bundle product type
to meet the requirements for complex door and window products, such as certain options having dependencies on others, determining stock availability and delivery lead times based on particular options and hiding default options based on various conditions
Migrated a complex product data set that was inconsistent and unwieldy
(including many different product types and variations) to one that is standardised, easier to manage and follows best practice, leveraging more of default Magento’s feature set and reducing the amount of custom development required to output and purchase products on the site
Custom SEO requirements
including bespoke default URL paths and canonicalisation implementation to allows include the longest category path in product URLs and use of hierarchical paths for CMS pages for the advice centre and customer galleries
Introduced colour swatches to the product detail page (PDP)
to provide quicker navigation and to highlight the different options to customers who landed on the site via the PDP (e.g. from a PPC - Pay Per Click - link, such as Google Shopping)
Implemented an ‘add to cart popup’
to aid conversion and cross-sells to increase average order value
Retained and improved upon the existing inspirational and content areas
such as customer galleries, case studies and the vast advice centre section
Built a custom order approval workflow process
to allow manual review of new orders to the risk of fraud with high value orders
Integration with Sage for order fulfillment and account purposes
requiring a large amount of bespoke work to account for the complex product types being ordered
Bespoke solution to allow requesting quotes for custom products or sizes
along with price on application status for certain products
Bespoke implementation to aggregate reviews across the site by range
rather than individual products (given their similarities, i.e. just colour/size differences)
Complex shipping logic achieved with a combination of ShipperHQ and bespoke code
facilitating delayed delivery/dispatch options and allowing customers to flag if they have restricted access
Custom product listing (category) pages
multiple products combined into single listings (using colour swatches) to achieve the desired UX output, which required careful implementation and bespoke caching to ensure it remained performant
Replication of a vast array of complex schema
(SEO markup/rich snippets) output
Implemented a blog solution
to allow for the display of case studies across the site
Utilised Page Builder, including many custom built content types
facilitating the content output across the site
Trade storefront that utilises Magento’s B2B suite
with prices hidden to the public, sign-up approval process for new prospective customers and tailored prices with discounts for logged in users
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