Henry Holsters: AOV +15%, Items per Order +37% — After the Owner Benchmarked Them as the Slowest in Their Category

When Andrew Henry of Henry Holsters first spoke with us, he’d already done the diagnosis himself.

Andrew is a CNC machinist and product designer by trade. The founder. His main business is OEM manufacturing — designing and producing parts for other firearms brands, like a ghost kitchen for the industry. Henry Holsters is the retail line. It accounts for around 20% of revenue, but it’s the highest-margin channel in the entire business.

A few months before he spoke with us, Andrew had benchmarked his site against five competitors. They were friends of his. Some of them, he manufactures parts for.

“I benchmarked us against 4 or 5 of my friend’s companies that are all in the same space… we were consistently the slowest out of the 5 or 6 that I looked at on almost everything.”

Andrew Henry, Founder, Henry Holsters

He didn’t need anyone to tell him there was a problem. He needed someone who could do something about it.

The TL;DR:

• Average order value up 15%: $120 → $138. Same customers, more spend per transaction on the highest-margin channel in the business.
• Items per order up 37%: 2.2 → 3.0. The product page rebuild surfaced accessories where customers could see them. They started buying the holster and the belt clips, options, and attachments.
• Mobile PageSpeed 56 → 95 out of 100. With 70% of traffic on mobile, the gap between 56 and 95 was costing them every day.
• Platform ceiling, not team ceiling. Andrew’s COO Ben moved PageSpeed from 56 to 62 in one morning. Competent work — but 62 was the ceiling of what an in-house operator can do against WooCommerce’s out-of-the-box UX defaults and Elementor’s rendering overhead.
• Delivered Dec 4, 2025. Tier 1 firearms vertical. D2C is 20% of revenue but the highest margin in the business — which is exactly where the rebuilt purchase journey now compounds.

The owner-diagnosed problem: slowest in their own category

Most clients who reach us know something is wrong. Few have ranked themselves against their direct competitors before the first call. Andrew had. He’d run his site against five businesses he knew personally — some of them his manufacturing customers — and watched his store come last on almost every metric he checked.

That’s an unusual starting point. It collapses the discovery phase. We don’t have to convince Andrew there’s a problem. We don’t have to walk him through PageSpeed scores or Baymard violations to build the case. The diagnosis is on the table before we sit down. What’s left is the execution — the work he and his COO Ben can’t do internally because the platform itself is the ceiling.

What was broken

We audited Henry Holsters’ site against the Baymard Institute’s 239-point UX methodology — guidelines distilled from around 180,000 hours of research on the top ecommerce sites globally. The site rated poor across the board on both mobile and desktop.

The failing areas, in order of impact on the purchase journey:

• Product discovery: on-site search wasn’t prominent on mobile. No typo-tolerance. Categories buried in the menu structure. Around 40% of ecommerce visitors use site search to find what they’re looking for — Henry Holsters was making them work to find it.
• Product page: rated adequate. Customers making purchase decisions weren’t getting all the supporting information they needed at the point of decision.
• Cart and checkout: rated poor. Guest checkout wasn’t the default. The place-order button sat below the fold at the review step. The primary CTA wasn’t uniquely styled — customers had to look for it.

Performance was one of the failing areas. Mobile PageSpeed was 56 out of 100. Largest Contentful Paint was 8.2 seconds — Google wants 2.5. With 70% of Henry Holsters’ traffic on mobile, those numbers were costing them every day.

Andrew is unusual: he doesn’t shop from his phone, doesn’t keep browsers on it, runs it in grayscale. He’d never critically reviewed the mobile site. That’s not unusual for ecommerce owners. Most don’t.

Why this hadn’t been solved

Andrew is hands-off on the website. Used to manage it years ago, stepped back to focus on manufacturing and product design.

His COO, Ben Crum, runs the website operationally. Andrew is clear about Ben’s situation: he keeps the site functioning, but optimisation isn’t his skill set.

The morning of our discovery call, Ben got PageSpeed up from 56 to around 62 by adjusting caching and resolving conflicts between Cloudways and Cloudflare. A 40% improvement in First Contentful Paint in one morning. He’s competent. But 62 was the ceiling of what they could do internally — and 62 still rates poor on Google’s scale.

This is the pattern we see consistently. WooCommerce out-of-the-box has poor UX. There’s no off-the-shelf theme that addresses the fundamental requirements of the purchase journey — not for product discovery, not for the product page, not for cart and checkout. Page builders like Elementor compound the problem by adding performance overhead on top. A capable in-house operator can move things 10-20% in the right direction. They can’t get past the platform itself.

What we did

The work was rebuilding the parts of the purchase journey customers use, then making sure those rebuilds loaded in half a second.

UX rebuilds across the purchase journey

• On-site search: rebuilt with typo-tolerance and autocomplete. Surfaced prominently on mobile. Category structure simplified so customers could navigate from search to product without backtracking.
• Product page: rebuilt for decision-making — gallery layout, social proof, sticky add-to-cart on mobile, product options laid out instead of buried in dropdowns. Customers landing from organic search on a specific variant could decide without leaving the page.
• Cart and checkout: guest checkout set as default. Place-order button moved above the fold at the review step. Primary CTAs uniquely styled and consistently placed per Baymard guidelines.

Performance work supporting the rebuilds

• Replaced Elementor with a block-native theme. Elementor had been Ben’s ceiling — the page builder adds rendering overhead WooCommerce can’t optimise around.
• Standard performance optimisation across homepage, category, product, and checkout pages.

Delivered Dec 4, 2025.

Results: AOV +15%, Items per Order +37%

Metric	Change
Average order value	$120 → $138 (+15%)
Items per order	2.2 → 3.0 (+37%)
Mobile PageSpeed	56 → 95 out of 100

Average order value climbed 15%. Items per order climbed 37%.

Those numbers happened because the product page rebuild surfaces accessories where customers can see them, the cart UX lets people add without friction, and the checkout doesn’t lose them at the final step. Where customers used to buy the holster or the accessories, they now buy both. The holster sits around $100. Add accessories — belt clips, options, attachments — and the cart climbs to $140 or $150. That’s the gap between an AOV of $120 and an AOV of $138.

Mobile PageSpeed 56 → 95 is the foundation that made the UX work effective. Without sub-second page loads, the rebuilt product page still feels slow. The rebuilt cart still feels slow. The rebuilt checkout still loses customers at the final step. Speed alone wouldn’t have lifted AOV 15% — the UX rebuilds did that. But the performance work is what made the UX rebuilds register with customers.

“In places where we have both control over the product, control over the marketing, and control over the website, I would love to see us be able to generate more revenue from that D2C channel.”

Andrew Henry, Founder, Henry Holsters

The D2C channel is where Henry Holsters has the most leverage. It’s also where the rebuilt purchase journey now compounds — more items per order, higher average order value, on the highest-margin sales in the business.

If your WooCommerce store looks like this

If you’ve already benchmarked your store against your category and you’re behind, the diagnosis isn’t your problem. WooCommerce out-of-the-box doesn’t address UX across the purchase journey, and no off-the-shelf theme is going to do it for you. Page builders make the performance side worse. A competent in-house operator can move things 10-20% — but the platform itself is the ceiling. Getting past that ceiling is the work.

If your D2C channel is your highest-margin channel — the way it is for most manufacturer-led brands — that’s also where the gap between average and category-leading compounds fastest. A 15% AOV lift on the highest-margin channel in your business doesn’t read the same as a 15% lift somewhere else. That’s the part most owners undercount before they look at the math.

Frequently asked questions

Do you work with firearms or tactical WooCommerce stores?

Yes — firearms and tactical is one of our Tier 1 verticals. Mainstream agencies and platforms either avoid the category or restrict it outright. WooCommerce is the platform of necessity for most firearms retailers, and we specialise in making it perform for these stores. Henry Holsters, Infinite Defense, and Choice Ammunition are active clients in the category.

Can a capable in-house developer solve WooCommerce performance issues?

To a point. A capable in-house operator can typically move PageSpeed and UX 10-20% in the right direction — tuning caching, resolving plugin conflicts, fixing the obvious issues. Henry Holsters’ COO improved PageSpeed from 56 to 62 in one morning. That’s competent work. But 62 still rates poor on Google’s scale, and that’s the ceiling without rebuilding the parts of the purchase journey that WooCommerce out-of-the-box doesn’t address.

What is the WooCommerce platform ceiling?

WooCommerce out-of-the-box has poor UX defaults across product discovery, the product page, and cart and checkout. No off-the-shelf theme addresses the fundamental requirements of the purchase journey at the level the Baymard 239-point methodology measures. A capable in-house operator can patch around the edges, but the platform itself caps how far that work can go — usually around a 10-20% improvement. Getting past that ceiling requires rebuilding the purchase journey on a block-native theme with the UX defaults addressed at the foundation.

Why are page builders like Elementor bad for WooCommerce performance?

Page builders add rendering overhead WooCommerce can’t optimise around. Elementor, Divi, and Avada generate heavier, more complex DOM structures than block-native themes built with WordPress’s full-site-editing approach. The performance penalty is consistent: block-native themes load roughly 40% faster than page-builder-driven themes on the same hosting. Replacing the page builder is one of the highest-impact changes available on most WooCommerce stores.

How does the Baymard 239-point UX methodology work?

The Baymard Institute’s 239-point UX methodology is distilled from around 180,000 hours of user testing research on the top ecommerce sites globally. The guidelines cover homepage, product listing, product detail, cart, checkout, account, and mobile-specific UX. Stores are scored as a percentage. Most WooCommerce stores score in the 45-60% range — rated poor to adequate. Henry Holsters rated poor across the board on both mobile and desktop before the rebuild.

Why did items per order go up 37% after the rebuild?

Because the product page rebuild surfaced accessories where customers could see them, the cart UX let people add without friction, and the checkout didn’t lose them at the final step. Where Henry Holsters’ customers used to buy the holster or the accessories, they now buy both. The holster sits around $100. Add accessories — belt clips, options, attachments — and the cart climbs to $140 or $150. That’s the gap between an items-per-order of 2.2 and 3.0.

What’s the difference between performance work and UX work?

Performance work is about how fast the site loads — PageSpeed, First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, Time to First Byte. UX work is about what the site does once it’s loaded — how customers find products, evaluate them, add to cart, and check out. On Henry Holsters, the UX rebuilds drove the 15% AOV lift and 37% items-per-order lift. The performance work made those UX rebuilds register with customers. Without sub-second page loads, the rebuilt product page still feels slow. Without the UX rebuild, fast loads land on a page that doesn’t convert. You need both.

Can guest checkout really impact average order value?

It impacts conversion before it impacts AOV. Forced account creation is the second-most-common reason US shoppers abandon carts — 25%, per Baymard. Once you set guest checkout as the default and the customer completes the transaction, you get the chance to surface accessories or upsells inside the same purchase journey. The AOV lift comes from the combination of guest-checkout-first, accessories surfaced in cart, and a place-order button that doesn’t sit below the fold at the review step.

How do I benchmark my WooCommerce store against competitors?

Run their site through PageSpeed Insights on both mobile and desktop. Walk through their full purchase journey on your phone — product discovery, search, product page, cart, checkout. Note where they’re faster or more polished and where you are. Andrew Henry did this manually against five competitors before contacting us — that’s an unusual but valuable starting point. We can do a formal version against the Baymard 239-point standard as part of any audit.

Why is the D2C channel so important for manufacturer-led brands?

It’s typically the highest-margin channel in the business. For Henry Holsters, D2C is around 20% of revenue but the highest margin in the entire business — OEM manufacturing accounts for most of the top line but trades volume for margin. Lifting AOV 15% on the highest-margin channel doesn’t read the same as lifting it somewhere else. That math is why purchase-journey work on D2C compounds harder than equivalent work on wholesale or retail channels.

The pattern: platform ceiling, purchase journey, highest-margin channel

Henry Holsters is the third restricted-vertical case study we’ve shipped where the headline outcome wasn’t more traffic — it was the same customers, finally buying more on the same visit. AOV $120 to $138. Items per order 2.2 to 3.0. Mobile PageSpeed 56 to 95. Done by getting past the WooCommerce platform ceiling that the COO had already pushed up against and couldn’t move further.

If your team is already doing competent work and the numbers aren’t moving the way you want, the gap probably isn’t them. It’s the platform. WooCommerce out-of-the-box has poor UX defaults across the purchase journey, and Elementor or any other page builder compounds the performance side of the problem. A capable internal operator hits a ceiling, the way Ben did. Getting past the ceiling is the work.

If your D2C channel is the highest-margin channel in your business — the way it is for most manufacturer-led brands — the math on lifting AOV there compounds harder than equivalent work anywhere else in the operation.