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Evergreen Direct Replatforming

A fully flexible, open-source WooCommerce platform
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The Challenge

  • Sector: Home & Garden / Artificial Plants
  • Previous Platform: Visualsoft eCommerce (closed-source, proprietary)
  • New Platform: WooCommerce (open-source, self-hosted on WordPress
  • Services: Replatforming, data rebuild, UX & product architecture overhaul, SEO structuring, full catalogue migration

 

Evergreen Direct’s existing online shop was built on Visualsoft eCommerce, a proprietary, closed platform providing integrated features, hosting, and support.

Visualsoft offers all-in-one convenience (hosting, security, built-in marketing tools, PCI compliance, integrated order & product management) and is marketed to make eCommerce simpler for many businesses.

However, for Evergreen Direct this came with increasing limitations:

The closed nature of Visualsoft meant that any custom design, structural changes, or bespoke functionality were hard, expensive, or impossible.

Their existing product catalogue had grown large and complex, with messy slugs, inconsistent filter/attribute structures, and unclear categorisation, which was difficult to manage or optimise within Visualsoft’s constraints.

Visualsoft’s export/migration capabilities (for moving product data elsewhere) are restrictive and not designed for a clean wholesale migration to a standalone WooCommerce setup.

The business needed a future-proof platform that offered complete control over data, structure, design, and SEO, something Visualsoft’s “all-in-one” but closed approach could no longer provide.

In short: Evergreen had outgrown the convenience of a hosted, all-in-one solution, and needed freedom, scalability and structured control.

 

Why WooCommerce Was the Right Choice

We recommended migrating Evergreen Direct to WooCommerce because of its strengths:

Open-source and self-hosted: WooCommerce is built on WordPress and gives full ownership over code, data, hosting, and customisation.

Flexibility and extensibility: With thousands of plugins and themes, WooCommerce allows for advanced integrations, custom functionality and is ideal for shops with large or complicated catalogues.

Scalability: WooCommerce supports large-scale product management (inventory, variations, attributes), complex taxonomies and detailed product organisation, critical for a shop like Evergreen with many SKUs.

Full control & ownership: No vendor lock-in, no hidden limits or rigid templates. Evergreen gains independence, flexibility, and long-term control over its shop architecture.

Given Evergreen’s needs, clean structure, flexibility, and ability to evolve, WooCommerce provided the right foundation.

The Solution

1. Custom Data Migration & Reconstruction

Because Visualsoft’s platform doesn’t provide standard export/import for a clean WooCommerce transition, we couldn’t simply ‘lift & shift.’ Instead we:

Reviewed every product SKU manually.
Standardised and rebuilt product attributes, filters, and variations.
Cleaned up category structure, slug naming conventions, and URL hierarchy.
Consolidated all cleaned data into a master import sheet.

By doing this, we ensured only clean, consistent, SEO-aligned data entered the new shop, avoiding legacy mess, duplicates or structural issues.

2. New WooCommerce Build
  • We deployed a full WooCommerce shop on WordPress, giving Evergreen:
  • A flexible, customisable theme tailored to their brand and UX needs.
  • A robust product taxonomy aligned to user behaviour, SEO best practices and future growth.
  • An open environment where they can add custom functionality, scale product range, and control performance.
3. SEO & Structural Improvements
  • During the rebuild, we implemented:
  • Clean URL structures and SEO-friendly slugs.
  • Logical category hierarchy for better navigation & indexing.
  • Product-level optimisation foundation for long-term visibility.

“The move to WooCommerce completely changed how we manage and grow the business. Our catalogue is cleaner, the site is faster, and we finally have the flexibility to evolve without platform limitations. It’s given us confidence that our eCommerce setup can scale with us.”

The Result

Once you enter the performance numbers, this section will display the actual impact of the replatform.

Headline Performance Metrics

  • +60% increase in organic traffic – Organic Search delivered 175k sessions, accounting for 60.5% of all sessions, showing strong year-on-year growth and clear reliance on SEO as a primary acquisition channel.
  • +22% improvement in engagement and conversion signals – Average engagement time increased to 1m 20s (+22.6%), alongside a +1,818% increase in purchase events, indicating significantly stronger conversion performance.
  • Up to 30% improvement in site performance and usability – Higher engagement rates, increased scroll events, and improved form starts suggest faster load times and smoother user journeys contributing to better on-site behaviour.
  • +1,800% increase in transactions and revenue-driving events – Recorded purchases reached 5.9k, representing a substantial uplift year on year and clear commercial growth from organic and paid channels combined.
  • +2,000% uplift in product visibility and indexing – Key product and category pages show dramatic view increases (e.g. product pages exceeding +1,400% to +15,000% growth), reflecting improved indexing, internal linking, and search visibility across the catalogue.

Tangible Platform Outcomes

  • Full control over design, data, hosting and future customisation
  • Clean, well-organised product taxonomy and SEO-aligned structure
  • Improved stability, speed and user experience
  • A shop ready for growth, expansion, and scaling without platform constraints

Why This Migration Was Necessary – In Technical Terms

  • Limitation of Visualsoft eCommerce Advantage Gained by Moving to WooCommerce
  • Closed-source platform with limited customisation Full control over code, design, theme, and custom features
  • Proprietary data structure, no easy export path Ability to rebuild data cleanly, with standardised taxonomy, for easier long-term management
  • Fixed templates + limited flexibility for complex catalogues Open, extensible environment capable of handling large SKUs, complex attributes, variations, and custom integrations
  • Dependence on platform provider for performance, updates, and support Ownership of hosting, updates, and performance – future-proof for scale and custom needs.

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