Revenue +62% · Conversion +45% · AOV +21% · Mobile PageSpeed 28 → 97 · SemRush site health 74 → 91 (and climbing) · Delivered May 6, 2026
60 days after launch vs the 60 days before
When Shane of Austin Natural Mattress first paid us for an audit in June 2025, he’d been running the business for 25 years. Two stores – Austin (the flagship) and Houston – carrying Avocado, Naturepedic, Vispring, and his own in-house line. 99% of revenue runs through the showrooms. The website is the billboard that drives foot traffic and phone calls into the stores.
Shane wasn’t asking for an online revenue machine. He wanted a website on par with the brands he carried and the in-store experience he’d built. As he put it: “the website needs to kick ass.”
What the audit found
We delivered two audits. The performance audit drew on 11 years and over 300 WooCommerce engagements – we know what slows these sites down and what resolves it. The UX audit ran against the Baymard Institute’s 239-point methodology, distilled from around 180,000 hours of research on the top ecommerce sites globally.
The findings, summarized:
- Mobile PageSpeed: 28 out of 100
- Largest Contentful Paint: 16.5 seconds (Google wants 2.5)
- 250 UX failures across product discovery, search, navigation, trust signals
For a retailer selling $50K mattresses, the trust gap was the gap.
Shane’s existing developer was already mid-redesign when our audit landed. He gave her free rein to implement everything we’d recommended. Six weeks later the new site was live.
How the rebuild made things worse
We ran the post-launch numbers on December 2nd, 2025. The data was unambiguous:
- Mobile PageSpeed: 28 → 44. Improvement on the surface metric, but…
- Largest Contentful Paint: 16.5s → 18.6s. The metric that determines whether a visitor sees the page before they leave became 2.1 seconds slower.
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0 → 0.464. Layout shift didn’t exist on the old site. The rebuild introduced it – pages where elements jump around as they load, frustrating for users, penalized by Google.
- UX recommendations implemented from our audit: 0 of 250.
- SemRush site health: 90 → 74. Shane and Amanda (his partner) had been monitoring this themselves.
- Google Analytics: still not configured to track revenue. Shane was flying blind on whether the new site was working at all.
On top of the SEO and performance damage, the rebuild had destroyed the order history. The previous site’s data didn’t carry over. Shane couldn’t compare the new site to the old site on any longitudinal sales metric. The information you need to evaluate a rebuild’s impact was the first thing the rebuild deleted.
This is the case against rebuilds in one project. We don’t do them, and this is exactly why.
What we said to Shane
On December 2nd we wrote to Shane with the numbers. We didn’t pitch. We told him what we were seeing, included the verbatim data, and ended with one principle:
“I know you value relationships, Shane. I could see that in how you handled the dynamic on our calls. But when that relationship is costing you – in time, in quality, in opportunity – it stops being loyalty and starts being expensive.”
Campbell Angus, in an email to Shane, December 2, 2025
The developer’s own position, captured in our November call with her: she hadn’t gone into the UX audit deeply. Shane’s account exceeded her capacity. Her sub-contractor was running behind. That’s a structural problem, not a personal one. Capable generalist developers hit the same ceiling on WooCommerce that capable owner-operators hit. The platform out-of-the-box has poor UX, no off-the-shelf theme addresses the purchase journey, and page-builder themes add performance overhead nothing resolves from the outside.
Three weeks after the email, Shane brought us in to take over.
We’ll show you exactly where your store loses revenue.
We audit your store across UX, performance, and conversion, then show you the specific issues costing you orders – each one measured against revenue impact. You get a prioritised list of what’s losing money and what it’s worth to resolve.
- ✓239-point Baymard UX audit
- ✓Core Web Vitals + LCP + CLS benchmark
- ✓SemRush health benchmark
Every finding comes with the revenue it’s costing you and the lift from resolving it. You decide what’s worth doing.
What we did
We don’t do rebuilds. In 11 years, we never have. Austin Natural Mattress’s site after we shipped was the same site they came to us with – same URL, same content, same orders, same customer data. What changed was the underlying theme, the failing UX areas across the purchase journey, and the performance configuration. Same store. Working properly.
The work was diagnosing the specific failures against the Baymard guidelines and resolving each one.
UX changes across the purchase journey – mobile-first
Most of Austin Natural Mattress’s traffic was mobile. So was most of the broken experience. The audit findings were applied with mobile as the design lead, not as an afterthought to the desktop layout. Tablet and desktop followed.
- Header restructured. The previous version was consuming around 50% of the mobile screen before a product appeared. Reduced to the recommended 20%, with categories surfaced where customers would find them.
- On-site search replaced. New search with proper indexing and typo tolerance. Predictive results pulling categories first, then products, in the layout Baymard guidelines specify.
- Product page redesigned. For a $50K mattress purchase, trust signals do more work than copy. Customer reviews surfaced on product pages, descriptions delivered in both bullet and paragraph form (different buyers scan differently), supporting product information laid out for decision-making instead of placed below the fold.
- Cart and checkout redesigned per Baymard guidelines – guest checkout default, fewer fields, clearer steps.
- Visual polish. The design Shane’s previous developer shipped looked good. We kept what worked, replaced what didn’t, and made the parts that mattered for conversion work the way the audit said they should.
Performance work supporting the UX changes
- Replaced the page-builder theme that had been carrying the rebuild’s performance debt
- Standard performance optimization across homepage, category, product, cart, and checkout
- Mobile PageSpeed across homepage, category, and product pages: 97 / 93 / 95
- LCP back below Google’s target. CLS resolved.
Austin went live May 6, 2026. Houston followed, using the Austin work as the base.
Results
Comparing the 60 days after launch (May 6 – July 4, 2026) against the 60 days before (March 6 – May 5, 2026), when the previous developer’s rebuild was live:
| Metric | Change |
|---|---|
| Revenue | +62% |
| Orders | +33% |
| Average order value | +21% |
| Conversion rate* | +45% |
| Mobile PageSpeed (homepage) | 28 → 97 |
| SemRush site health | 74 → 91 |
*Excludes junk desktop traffic from both periods. Revenue and orders exclude failed and refunded orders.
Orders up 33% and average order value up 21% compound to revenue up 62%.
AOV is where the UX work shows up most directly. For a mattress retailer where a single purchase can run into five figures, the redesigned product page does the decision-support work the old one wasn’t doing – reviews surfaced, specifications presented for both scanners and readers, trust signals in the places where buyers make the decision.
Conversion up 45% is the mobile-first work. The header no longer takes half the screen, search returns results when a customer misspells a brand, and product pages load before visitors give up. More of the people who arrive now buy.
SemRush site health hit 91 and climbing – above the 85-90 baseline before the previous rebuild dropped it to 74. The platform fundamentals are where Shane had been told they would be.
What Amanda said
Amanda left this Google review after launch:
“Hello, we have four websites that do ecommerce, two of them are connected to local physical store locations in Texas. Blaze so far has rebuilt both of our WooCommerce sites for our two store locations in Texas and I’d absolutely recommend them to any store physical store or ecommerce owner without hesitation.
Both sites were a little old fashioned, had issues and needed a full overhaul. Blaze did a full diagnostic audit checking all the nooks and crannies and showed us how to maximize user experience for purchase conversions. They took every piece of feedback we gave them and built it in, so what we ended up with is genuinely custom and has literally everything we wanted. The sites look current now, they’re easy to navigate, and the best part is that it actually did translate to an increase in online purchases, decreased bounce rates, increased page speed and more traffic. Right now they’re working on our AI discoverability, making sure we show up when people are searching through AI tools instead of Google. And pretty soon they will be working on overhauling our other two sites. Communication has been excellent, which is the thing you worry about most with an agency (especially on the other side of the world). Questions always get answered, we always know where things stand, and we never have to chase anybody down. We were so happy with the results and professionalism, we also kept them on for general website management. That should tell you how we feel about Blaze… they’re awesome.”
– Amanda Demuth, Austin Natural Mattress · ★★★★★ · read on Google
Amanda calls it a rebuild. To their customers, the site is new. Underneath, it’s the same store: same URL, same content, same order history. The rebuild before us deleted the order history. Nothing was lost this time.
Shane and Amanda kept us on for ongoing site management. Their other two sites are next.
If your WooCommerce store looks like this
If you’ve paid for an audit and handed it to your existing developer to implement, look at what has changed on the metrics – not what’s been promised. The audit identifies the work. It doesn’t do the work.
If you’ve gone through a recent rebuild and something feels off – the site looks newer but performs worse, or pages jump around as they load, or your site health score dropped after the launch – those are measurable problems. They don’t resolve themselves, and they don’t resolve with the same hands that built them.
You don’t need a new site. You need the one you have working properly. That’s what we do.
Frequently asked questions
Can a WooCommerce rebuild make things worse?
Yes – and it’s more common than the industry admits. Austin Natural Mattress’s previous rebuild improved the surface PageSpeed score (28 → 44) while making Largest Contentful Paint slower (16.5s → 18.6s), introducing Cumulative Layout Shift from zero to 0.464, dropping SemRush site health from 90 to 74, and deleting the historical order data needed to evaluate any of it. A rebuild that improves one metric while degrading three others isn’t an improvement. It’s a regression dressed as progress.
What’s the difference between PageSpeed and Largest Contentful Paint?
PageSpeed is a composite score from 0 to 100 that summarizes a basket of metrics. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one specific metric inside that score – it measures how long it takes for the largest visible element on the page to render. PageSpeed can improve while LCP gets worse if other component metrics offset the loss. For real-world conversion, LCP matters more than the score: a visitor decides whether to stay based on how fast the page appears, not on a composite number they’ll never see.
What is Cumulative Layout Shift and why does it matter?
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much the page moves around as it loads. When images load late and push the text down, or buttons appear after the user has already started reading, that’s CLS. Google penalizes high-CLS sites in search rankings. Users tap the wrong thing because the page shifted between their decision and their tap. Austin Natural Mattress’s previous rebuild introduced a CLS of 0.464 – Google’s “good” threshold is 0.1. Anything above 0.25 is rated poor. The old site, before any rebuild, had a CLS of zero.
Should I let my existing developer implement a UX audit?
Only if they have specific WooCommerce purchase-journey experience and the bandwidth to do the work. Generalist developers hit the same WooCommerce platform ceiling that owner-operators hit – the out-of-the-box UX is poor, no off-the-shelf theme addresses the purchase journey, and page-builder themes add performance overhead that nothing resolves from the outside. An audit identifies the work. It doesn’t do the work. Handing a multi-layer UX and performance audit to a generalist developer mid-project is asking them to do something the platform itself isn’t built to support.
What happens to order history during a WooCommerce rebuild?
It depends on the rebuild approach. If the database is preserved, order history carries over. If the rebuild starts from a fresh database, customer orders, purchase history, and longitudinal sales data can be lost. Austin Natural Mattress’s previous rebuild destroyed the historical order data – meaning Shane couldn’t compare new-site performance against old-site baseline on any sales metric. The information needed to evaluate the rebuild’s impact was the first thing the rebuild deleted. Our approach preserves the database, the orders, and the customer data because we don’t rebuild – we work on top of what’s already there.
How do you measure if a website rebuild was successful?
Six measurements, in order of importance: (1) Core Web Vitals – LCP, CLS, INP – against Google’s thresholds. (2) Mobile PageSpeed across homepage, category, and product pages. (3) UX rated against established ecommerce research on mobile and desktop. (4) Conversion rate, AOV, and items per order in the same period year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter. (5) SemRush site health vs the pre-launch baseline. (6) Revenue tracking in Google Analytics configured and reporting. If any of these went backwards after the launch, the project has a problem the lead may not be telling you about.
Why did Austin Natural Mattress’s revenue go up 62%?
Two gains compounding. Orders rose 33% and average order value rose 21% over the 60 days after launch compared with the 60 days before. More buyers completed a purchase, and each purchase was worth more. Neither came from new traffic – the same visitors converted better on a faster, clearer site.
Why did Austin Natural Mattress’s AOV go up 21%?
The redesigned product page did most of the work. For a mattress purchase that can run into five figures, trust signals matter more than copy – reviews surfaced on the product page where buyers make the decision, specifications laid out in both bullet and paragraph form (different buyers scan differently), supporting information placed for decision-making instead of below the fold. The restructured cart and checkout closed the gap at the final step. For premium-brand retail, the trust gap is the AOV gap.
Why did the conversion rate go up 45%?
The mobile-first UX work. The header no longer takes half the mobile screen, search returns results when a customer misspells a brand name, and product pages load before visitors give up. The conversion figure excludes junk desktop traffic from both periods, so it reflects real shoppers. More of the people who arrive now buy.
Is mobile-first design really different from mobile-responsive design?
Yes. Mobile-responsive means a desktop design that adapts to a smaller screen. Mobile-first means the mobile experience is the design lead, with tablet and desktop following. The difference shows up in the header (Austin Natural Mattress’s old header consumed 50% of the mobile screen before a product appeared – reduced to 20%), the navigation (categories surfaced instead of buried in a hamburger menu), and the product page (decision-support information sized for thumb-scrolling instead of print-catalog scanning). When 70-80% of WooCommerce traffic is mobile, the mobile-first/responsive distinction is the difference between a site that converts and one that doesn’t.
Can a developer’s capacity be the real issue, not their skill?
Often, yes. Capable generalist developers running multiple client accounts hit a capacity ceiling that isn’t about skill – it’s about the time and depth a full UX implementation requires. Austin Natural Mattress’s previous developer was capable, but Shane’s account exceeded her capacity, her sub-contractor was running behind, and she hadn’t gone into the UX audit deeply. That’s a structural problem, not a personal failing. A capable generalist developer working at capacity will deliver a worse outcome than a specialist team with the bandwidth to do the work properly.
What is SemRush site health and how does it relate to performance?
SemRush site health is a composite SEO health score from 0 to 100 measuring crawlability, indexability, internal linking, page speed, and on-page issues. A drop in site health after a rebuild typically indicates broken internal links, lost canonical tags, structured data regressions, or new performance issues affecting crawl budget. Austin Natural Mattress’s site health was around 85-90 before the previous rebuild dropped it to 74. After our work, it hit 91 and is still climbing. For a site driven by organic search and local foot traffic to brick-and-mortar showrooms, a site health drop after a rebuild is a measurable revenue risk.
Schedule a call to discuss your UX and performance challenges with WooCommerce →