Building a Beautiful eCommerce Experience With WordPress
Gregory, Australia’s most recognized name in fine jewellery, tapped Frank Digital, a WP Engine Agency Partner, for help reimagining its digital presence.
Industry: Retail, Digital Agency
Site: gregoryjewellers.com.au by frankdigital.com.au
Challenge
Migrate a legacy website from Magento to WordPress and rebuild it with a strong security solution, a sleek UX, high availability, and uptime protection.
Solution
Frank Digital oversaw initial research, ideation, and prototype development for the project, and added custom functionality. A dedicated team at WP Engine worked behind the scenes to ensure the project was a success.
Results
A gorgeous website that reflects Gregory’s distinct craftsmanship and engages a growing, younger audience. The new site incorporates user-first intuition and powerful search solutions implemented by Frank Digital, all built on WP Engine’s fully managed WordPress platform. The result is a great-looking, easy-to-navigate website that loads in milliseconds with impressive engagement and conversion metrics:
- Bounce rate decreased by 26%
- Time on site increased by 69%
- Users and pageviews increased by 48%
As purveyors of fine diamonds and jewellery for 54 years, Gregory Jewellers has a long and lustrous heritage of exquisite craftsmanship and dedicated customer service. Today, the Gregory Jewellers brand continues the tradition of superb quality and service, boasting a diverse portfolio of fine jewellery, internationally renowned watch brands, and accessories that consistently set the bar for style and elegance.
Frank Digital, a Jaywing agency, is an award-winning digital agency combining strategy, creative, and technology to deliver beautiful digital experiences across all channels and devices. As a WP Engine Agency Partner, Frank Digital enjoys access to a dedicated agency account team, which works through specific project requirements to make sure all details are covered and every client is happy.
"Between our ability to build custom, sites based directly on our clients’ needs, and the security, performance, and peace of mind that comes with WP Engine, it’s a combination that really just sells itself."
—–Nick Miers, Head of Delivery, Frank Digital
A Digital Presence Fit for Fine Gems
Gregory Jewellers is one of Australia’s most well-known and trusted jewellers, and the family-owned businesses has a rich history of craftsmanship dating back more than 50 years.
With a growing chain of retail boutiques around the country, Gregory’s focus has long been on its in-store experience, where the beauty of its Master Jewellers’ craftsmanship truly shines through and customers can experience it all up close and in-person.
In turn, the company’s website was not traditionally where the majority of customer interactions occurred. Built on Magento and hosted internally, Gregory’s legacy site served a purpose, but with increasing performance issues and heightened security concerns, it was also limiting the company’s ability to grow online.
Meanwhile, Gregory’s audience was rapidly changing. In 2019, 66% of Gregory’s audience was over the age of 30, but by 2021, nearly half of its audience had shifted to 18-34-year-olds. The majority of Gregory’s online sales now come from this audience, with 44.8% of all sales on the website made by consumers under 34.
Combined with the surging eCommerce activity in response to the pandemic, and the growing need to reach younger audiences with a fast, personalized shopping experience, the team at Gregory knew it was time to make a shift, and they approached Frank Digital for a solution.
The new site needed to not only embody the beauty and detail found inside each of Gregory’s physical showrooms, it also needed to incorporate the latest in security and performance, all hosted on a platform that could provide high availability, advanced security, and around-the-clock support.
Finally, an eCommerce solution that was powerful enough to handle Gregory’s wide inventory catalog was a must-have.
Powerful eCommerce, Beautiful Design
Given all of these requirements, the Frank Digital team, led by Head of Delivery Nick Miers, dove in, kicking the project off with a hands-on, collaborative context session to go over all aspects of the new site.
Based on findings from their research, Miers and his team identified opportunities for UX design, as well as ways to streamline key business processes related to stock management and order fulfillment.
“Frank Digital specializes in these types of high-touch website overhauls,” Miers said. “Our process includes ideating numerous potential solutions, gradually refining the approach together with our client, and then developing that vision into a fully-functioning clickable prototype.”
Miers was able to focus on the prototype, knowing the production site would live on WP Engine’s fully managed WordPress platform, complete with high-performance, dedicated server infrastructure built on Google Cloud, and armed against cyber threats with Global Edge Security.
”Taking the performance and reliability benefits that come with a dedicated solution and combining them with all of the protections provided by Global Edge Security allowed us to provide the level of safety, security, and high availability the client was looking for,” Miers said.
From a build perspective, WooCommerce was used for the online storefront, to which the Frank Digital team added custom search functionality, allowing for an easy-to-navigate, seamless shopping experience.
Optimizing for site speed was also a major focus, and numerous tweaks, including image and JavaScript optimizations, were made across the site. Additionally, Google PageSpeed Insights was used for deeper analysis to make sure each page loaded as fast as possible and was in good standing with regard to all Core Web Vitals metrics.
The Results
More engagement, higher conversions, and a growing revenue stream.
With the website built and ready to launch, Miers and his team ran through final feedback loops, coordinating closely with their team at WP Engine, before signing off.
“We were able to test everything and provide feedback before we handed the new site over to the client,” Miers said. “That created a lot of value, and helped ensure that the final product was indeed a success.”
The team at Gregory was thrilled with the new UX and site design and immediately found the back-end far easier to manage and update than the legacy Magento site.
“They were extremely happy with the solution, and that was before the metrics started rolling in,” Miers said.
Those metrics reflected a growing online customer base that was far more engaged and more likely to convert:
- Bounce rate decreased by 26%
- Time on site increased by 69%
- Users and page views increased by 48%
Furthermore, the site gained attention and praise for its overall look and feel and was even shortlisted for a Site of the Day award.
“Overall, this project was a great example of the way Frank Digital works with leading brands to reimagine their digital presence, and it highlights the way we work with WP Engine to bring those projects to life, building them on the most trusted platform for WordPress,“ Miers said.
“Between our ability to build custom sites based directly on our clients’ needs, and the security, performance, and peace of mind that comes with WP Engine, it’s a combination that really just sells itself.”
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