Taking a 30-Year-Old Family Business Online in Six Weeks

The problem

Three decades of trading, an unusually knowledgeable team, a genuinely loyal customer base — and no way for anyone outside a twenty-mile radius to buy anything. Their web presence was a Facebook page updated when someone remembered.

Two previous attempts at getting online had stalled. The first was an agency quote for a fully custom e-commerce platform at a price that made the whole idea look irresponsible. The second was a cheap template site that took eight seconds to load, had never sold anything, and was abandoned within a year.

The owner’s assumption when we spoke was that going online meant a big, expensive, risky project. It didn’t.

What I built

A fast marketing site with the shop platform doing the commerce. The product catalogue, checkout, payments, tax, and stock live in a hosted e-commerce platform — problems that are entirely solved and not worth rebuilding. The public site is a statically generated front end, which is why it loads in under a second on a phone.

This split is the whole architectural decision, and it’s the one that made a six-week timeline possible.

Content built around the thing they were actually good at. Their real advantage was thirty years of knowing which product suits which situation. So the site leads with buying guides and comparisons written from that expertise, with products attached — rather than a bare grid of items competing on price with national chains.

That content became their search traffic. It’s the reason the site works.

Local search done properly. Structured data, a correctly configured business profile, location pages, and review collection. The shop was already the best option in its area; it just wasn’t findable.

A stock and dispatch flow the existing team could run. Deliberately unglamorous. Print the picking list, pack, scan, done. No new job titles, no separate system to reconcile — the existing shop staff absorbed fulfilment without anyone being hired.

Decisions worth noting

Almost nothing was custom. The temptation with a project like this is to build. Every hour spent building checkout is an hour not spent on the content that actually brings customers. The custom work amounted to the front end and the integration layer — perhaps 15% of the total surface area.

Performance was a requirement, not a nice-to-have. Most of their customers arrive on phones, often on rural connections. The previous site’s eight-second load was not a technical footnote; it was the reason it never sold anything. The rebuilt site hits largest contentful paint at 0.9 seconds.

They can update it without me. Products, prices, and articles are all editable by the team. I explicitly did not want to be a bottleneck on their own catalogue, and a site that requires a developer to change a price stops being updated.

The results

The first order arrived four days after launch, from a customer 200 miles away who had found a buying guide through search.

By month six, online accounted for 41% of revenue — with no reduction in shop trade, which had been the owner’s main worry. Search traffic to the guides grew steadily and now drives the majority of new customers.

The total build cost less than a fifth of the original agency quote, largely because most of it wasn’t built.

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Note: this is a representative case study written to illustrate the shape of a typical engagement while real client write-ups are being prepared and approved. Get in touch if you’d like to talk through a comparable project.