Doors And Worktops

What came in

The shop had already moved once, from WordPress to Wix, before it came to me. The owner was not looking for another platform change, but for someone who would take on sales and visibility for the long term. It went live on PrestaShop in autumn 2023 and has stayed under my care since.

What I built

Nothing here comes off a shelf: wooden garage doors in oak or pine across several construction styles, gates, front doors, sliding and patio doors, plus laminate kitchen worktops and cut-to-size building materials. The catalogue had to lead to a quote for something that does not exist yet, so variants are described by dimension, with colours and textures shown on the listing page so the choice starts before the product page opens. Where a configuration cannot close a sale, the customer sends an enquiry straight from the product page. The theme is my own, built as a child of PrestaShop’s default theme.

What changed

Visibility had been neglected on both previous platforms and became the main body of work: structured data, a Google Shopping feed, cleaned-up meta descriptions, and noindexing on products not visible to buyers. The content itself carried over without loss.

Performance work replaced the off-the-shelf pieces with my own modules. Carousels and product galleries run on one library, Swiper with PhotoSwipe for zoom, loaded only when needed, in place of three older scripts. The homepage slider is a custom module: each slide carries a separate mobile image, the server converts uploads to AVIF, WebP and JPG at several widths, and the first slide, the largest element on screen, is preloaded. Another module takes jQuery UI and the search scripts out of the startup bundle, 228 kB of the 620 kB loaded on every page, and fetches them on first use of the search.

YouTube Shorts run through a custom video library, shown in the product gallery, on the homepage, or anywhere in page content through a shortcode, with no scripts or styles of its own beyond the shop’s shared slider and lightbox. The encrypted cookie module gave way to my own consent bar, with Consent Mode v2 defaulting to denied and Microsoft Clarity loading only after consent, so it stays out of the first page load. The mobile PageSpeed score of the homepage went from 75 to 90, and LCP from 5.7 s to 3.4 s.

Worth knowing

The shop sells to both private customers and businesses, so for a while it showed net prices alongside gross on product pages, until the owner’s pricing policy changed and the net values were dropped from the cards. Three years of upkeep followed launch: a 2025 performance pass on preloading, images and startup libraries, a registration rule that blocks auto-created accounts by an unnatural capitalisation pattern, and a rebuilt invoice template. A search, homepage carousels and a one-page checkout were added well after launch.