— COMPANY
E-COMMERCE WEBSITE MANAGING & MAINTENANCE
ROLE
Website Developer
TOOLS
Took over maintenance of an outdated e-commerce site while building its replacement — cleaning up site structure, rebuilding the WooCommerce catalogue, and locking SEO-stable pages product by product.
// CONTENTS
Context
Description
Results
Learnings
Gallery
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— CONTEXT
TASKED TO BUILD NEW. HANDED THE OLD ONE TOO.
At the start of my second year, the brief was supposed to be simple: build the new website. In practice, I also inherited full responsibility for the existing one — chaotic, inconsistent, and badly in need of attention while the new build was still in progress. Before touching anything, I spent time auditing the site properly: mapping its structure, its product catalogue, and exactly how much technical debt had built up over time.
— DESCRIPTION
BUILDING FORWARD WHILE SOMEONE WANTED TO GO BACK
The first pass was pure site hygiene: pruning pages, sections, and categories that no longer served a purpose, tightening up the site architecture and making the remaining content easier to find and easier to crawl. From there I brought the brand guideline to life across the existing pages — fonts, colours, and layout pulled into line with the new identity, all hand-coded in custom CSS since the old site wasn't built in Divi like its replacement.
The WooCommerce catalogue got the same treatment: every product properly categorised, new category imagery, fresh product photography, and a more deliberate, conversion-minded layout for how products were merchandised on the page. AI workflows played a real part here too, used to help draft and optimise product copy at scale and to troubleshoot CSS and PHP issues faster than working through them line by line alone.
None of this happened in a clean lane, either. Recurring technical fires needed putting out constantly: incorrect receipts, crashes, caching conflicts, and page load speed issues that later became their own dedicated optimisation task. Parallel work on Gutenberg-based landing pages and GA4 tracking fed into the same goal of making the site measurably better, not just better-looking.
The bigger obstacle was the stakeholder relationship. Plenty of CSS and layout decisions got declined outright, and more than once the conversation turned into whether we should abandon the new CSS work altogether and roll back to the old version completely. I pushed back on that every time it came up.
— RESULTS
ONE LOCKED PAGE, THEN THE REST FOLLOWED.
The breakthrough was getting the homepage locked for good, built with proper on-page SEO in mind and finally agreed as untouchable. That gave me the precedent to apply the same approach product by product: stable layouts, optimised on-page content, and a structure built to actually move organic rankings (more on those results in the SEO and search console work). This became the dominant ongoing project for the second half of my time at the company, with a steady stream of new assets feeding it the whole way through.
— LEARNINGS
FIXING A SITE THAT WAS ALREADY BEING REPLACED.
The harder lesson was about running two timelines on one site. Improving a site that was simultaneously scheduled for replacement made it easy for the stakeholder to second-guess whether the investment was even worth it. Next time, I'd push for a clearer boundary up front: either pause new-site development to fully stabilise what's live, or agree on a hard cutover date and stop sinking deep CSS work into something due to be retired. Splitting effort across both, without that line drawn, is where most of the friction came from.
— GALLERY
THE GALLERY
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Let's create something worth noticing
Open to agency roles, in-house growth positions, all-round marketing roles and creative marketing projects.
Based in The Netherlands — available across Europe.
Languages
English
Spanish
Dutch