Your theme isn't slow. Your twenty-three apps are.
Every Shopify store launches fast. Then it accumulates, reviews, upsells, popups, loyalty, currency, size charts. Each one adds JavaScript to every page load, and nobody has ever uninstalled a Shopify app. Two years later the store takes six seconds to open and the answer everyone reaches for is a redesign, which fixes nothing if the same stack goes back on.
Every app promised more conversions. Together they cost you more.
Each one loads its own JavaScript on every page. Individually the cost is small enough to ignore. Twenty of them is a store that opens in six seconds, and a redesign that reinstalls the same stack lands you back here in a year.
Two stores, two different constraints.
Neither of these needed a prettier theme. Each one needed something specific removed or rebuilt.
+34%
Average order value growthLuxury checkout friction and low order value
High-end food buyers were checking out with single items, leaving high-margin accessories and complementary pairings unpurchased due to standard Shopify cart limits.
What we did, built custom post-purchase, cart-drawer, and one-click upsell architecture tailored to high-ticket buyers without compromising the premium brand experience.
3.8x
Direct-to-consumer conversion rateTechnical product education and D2C replatforming
Communicating complex chemical-free pool technology on a standard storefront led to high drop-off rates from confused, first-time shoppers.
What we did, designed a custom D2C storefront focused on visual benefit hierarchy, clear technical breakdown sections, and frictionless single-product checkout flows.
Six things, every build.
Not a theme with your logo on it.
App audit and cleanup
What you're carrying, what it costs, what goes. Including the leftover code from apps you already removed, uninstalling rarely removes everything, and the scripts keep loading.
Custom theme, not a purchased one
Built on Shopify's current framework with only the code your store actually uses. Purchased themes ship with features for every possible business, and you load all of them regardless.
Built in sections and blocks
Your team edits pages without a developer. New landing pages, seasonal layouts, content swaps, all in the visual editor. An agency that makes you pay for every content change has designed it that way.
Product and collection templates
The pages that convert, designed as templates rather than one-offs, so a new product looks right without anyone building it a page.
Checkout and payment configuration
Shop Pay and wallet payments enabled, guest checkout on, address autofill working, and shipping costs shown before the final step rather than after.
Feed and tracking wired in
Product feed structured for Merchant Center, conversion tracking verified, and analytics recording what actually happened rather than what a plugin assumed.
Redesigns don't lose traffic. Unmapped URLs do.
Everyone knows a store that relaunched and watched organic traffic halve. It's almost never the design. It's that a few hundred URLs changed shape, nobody mapped them, and Google spent three months rediscovering a site it already understood.
Shopify makes this worse than most platforms, because it enforces its own URL structure. Your /product/blue-widget becomes /products/blue-widget, collections move, and paginated category URLs disappear entirely. Every one of those needs a redirect written before launch.
It's tedious, it isn't visible in a mockup, and it's the difference between a relaunch that holds its rankings and one that spends six months recovering.
Every indexed page pulled from Search Console and a crawl, not just what's in the current sitemap. Old pages still ranking are the ones most often missed.
Each old URL matched to its closest new equivalent. Where nothing matches, that's a decision to make deliberately rather than a 404 to discover later.
SKUs, options, inventory, images and metafields checked after import. Variant structures are where migrations quietly lose data.
Analytics, ad platform pixels and conversion events confirmed firing on the new store before the switch, not after someone notices revenue reporting looks wrong.
Watching for 404s, redirect chains and indexing problems in the first weeks, when they're cheap to fix and easy to miss.
Eight to twelve weeks. Design starts in week three.
The first two weeks decide whether the build solves anything. Most agencies skip them and start on mockups.
What you're carrying
App stack, current speed, what's actually converting and what's leftover code from apps you already cancelled. You get the removal list whether you continue or not.
Weeks 1–2Templates, not pages
Home, collection, product, cart and the content templates you'll reuse. Designed as configurable sections from the start so your team can build pages later without us.
Weeks 3–5Theme, data, redirects
Custom theme development, product and content migration, and the redirect map written and reviewed. The redirect work happens here, not in launch week when there's no time to check it.
Weeks 5–10Switch and watch
Staged launch, tracking verified before the switch, then crawl monitoring for 404s and indexing issues through the first weeks. Handover documentation delivered with it.
Weeks 10–12Three bands. Catalogue size decides which.
Not template complexity, the number of products and how complicated your variants are is what actually drives the hours.
Rebuild
$10,000–$18,0006–8 weeks
Fits if: you're already on Shopify, under roughly 200 products, and the problem is speed and conversion rather than structure.
- App audit and cleanup
- Custom theme, built lean
- Core templates as editable sections
- Redirects mapped and tested
- Handover documentation
Full build
$18,000–$35,0008–12 weeks
Fits if: larger catalogue, complex variants, or you're migrating from WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Magento.
- Everything in Rebuild
- Full platform migration
- Product and variant data mapping
- Custom collection and filtering logic
- Integrations, ERP, 3PL, CRM
- Post-launch crawl monitoring
Enterprise
$35,000+12 weeks and up
Fits if: Shopify Plus, multi-store or multi-currency, B2B pricing rules, or checkout extensions.
- Everything in Full build
- Shopify Plus and checkout extensibility
- Multi-store or multi-market architecture
- B2B catalogues and pricing rules
- Headless front end where genuinely required
- Shopify's own subscription and app costs are yours, billed directly. We don't resell either, so nothing about which apps we recommend keeping depends on our margin.
- You own the theme. Files, documentation and store access all in your name. No licence, nothing that stops working if we part ways.
- Not sure you need a rebuild? Say so. Sometimes the answer is removing six apps and fixing your product template, a much smaller job, and we'd rather tell you that than sell you a project.
Before you call.
Our store is slow. Do we need a full redesign?
Often not. Most Shopify speed problems are apps, not themes, each one loads its own JavaScript on every page, and stores accumulate them for years without removing any.
Before quoting a rebuild we'd look at what you're actually carrying. Sometimes the answer is removing six apps, fixing image handling and cleaning leftover code from apps you already cancelled, a much smaller job than a redesign. The triage above is roughly how we'd approach it.
Will we lose our Google rankings when we relaunch?
Not if the URLs are mapped properly, and that's where relaunches actually go wrong, almost never the design. Shopify enforces its own URL structure, so migrating means product and collection URLs change shape, and every one needs a redirect written before launch rather than discovered afterwards.
We pull the full URL inventory from Search Console and a crawl, map every ranking page, and review the map with you. It's tedious, invisible in a mockup, and it's the difference between holding rankings and spending six months recovering them. More detail here.
Can our team update the site without a developer?
Yes, and we build specifically for that. Every page is assembled from configurable sections, so your team changes copy, images, ordering and layout in the Shopify editor without touching code.
This is the thing most agencies leave out, and the reason is commercial: a theme your client can edit is a theme they stop paying you to change. We'd rather you only called us for work that actually needs us.
Should we use a premium theme instead?
Sometimes, and we'll say so. A well-built marketplace theme is a reasonable choice for a small catalogue and a limited budget, it'll be faster to launch and considerably cheaper.
Where it stops working is complex variants, unusual merchandising logic, or when you end up bolting six apps on to recreate something the theme won't do. That's the point at which a custom build costs less than the workarounds. If you're not there yet, buy the theme.
How long does a Shopify build take?
Six to eight weeks for a rebuild on an existing store, eight to twelve for a full build or migration, longer for Plus and multi-store work. Design starts in week three, the first two go on auditing what you're carrying and mapping what needs to survive.
The biggest cause of overrun is content: product descriptions, images and copy that need writing while the build runs. Worth starting that early.
Do you migrate from WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Magento?
Yes, and each has its own difficulties. WooCommerce migrations usually have the messiest URL structures. Magento and Adobe Commerce carry the most complex pricing and catalogue logic, which doesn't always map cleanly onto Shopify. BigCommerce is generally the most straightforward.
We'd want to see your current setup before committing to a timeline, variant structures and custom pricing rules are where migrations get expensive, and that's difficult to judge from a description.
Do you handle SEO and ads after launch?
Yes, though they're separate engagements. Shopify SEO picks up where the build leaves off, and eCommerce PPC and Merchant Center handle paid.
They work better together for an obvious reason: the redirect map, the feed structure and the site architecture are the same decisions viewed from three angles, and having them made by one team avoids the handover where things get lost.
What happens after launch?
Send us your store URL. We'll tell you what to delete.
No access needed, we can see most of it from the outside. You'll get a list of what's loading on every page, what we'd remove, what's leftover code from apps you already cancelled, and roughly what that's costing you in load time. Plenty of stores act on it themselves and never call back. That's a fine outcome.
No store access required · No obligation · The list is yours