Case Study: How Natural Dog Company Saw a +50% Improvement In Page Speed & 70% Lift in Conversion

The founder of Natural Dog Company, a brand that sells plant-based products for dogs of all ages, sizes, and breeds, started her business after being advised to make lifestyle changes herself due to the toxins present in everyday life. 

The company flourished as consumers looking to find holistic healing for their furry friends explored the Natural Dog Company products. After the founder realized her e-commerce site could also use some healing, she came to Avex Designs.

Natural Dog Company adheres to strict ethical standards, offering only organic and all-natural ingredients in their line of soothing balms, nourishing supplements and shampoo bars. They knew their customers needed to be able to seamlessly learn about their product’s vegan ingredients and company’s cruelty-free research. 

The Pain Points

“Our previous website was incredibly slow, the design was outdated, and the checkout process was extremely confusing and complicated,” said Bobby Reger, the Director of Marketing at Natural Dog Company’s Parent Company, Elements Brands.

Plagued by slow, outdated, buggy technology, they came to us with a vision to fully migrate their website from WordPress to Shopify Plus and create a stellar, on-brand refresh that embodies their modern, energetic outlook, and unparalleled dedication to all four-legged friends.

Our Migration Compromise

Migrating data can not only be complex but also possibly disadvantageous. We wanted to ensure the website kept its high ranking while we integrate our agency’s plan for creating the most efficient e-commerce site. 

Underneath a heavy load of content, we ended up discovering valuable SEO from existing blog posts and testimonials. To retain this crucial piece of the site, we proposed a cross-platform solution where we would integrate the e-commerce business into Shopify Plus to optimize purchasing power while keeping the remaining half of the site in WordPress.

As a Shopify Partner, we strive to utilize the platform to the best of its abilities when it comes to our clients. For Natural Dog Co, they had seen the capabilities Shopify had and decided it would be a great time for them to upgrade to Shopify Plus to ensure even more potential growth. 

“Shopify has proven time and again to be an easier to use and more effective e-commerce platform than other options such as WooCommerce that we have worked with in the past.” - Bobby Reger

Reorganizing existing content allowed Natural Dog Co to keep valuable WordPress data while crafting a seamless flow to connect the two platforms with custom product fields in Shopify and re-vamped blogs adjusted for more compelling storytelling. The new site pages ended up with 50-70 301 redirects, which we used to make sure those redirects don’t hurt the site’s ranking. 

We used Cart2Cart for the content migration and the customer data transfers. Cart2Cart created a template for us in order to efficiently map and redirect the old product barcodes and SKUs that were in the customers’ order history to the new and improved barcodes and SKUs that Avex set up in Shopify Plus. 

The specifics for the content transfer included:

• 65 products

• 200 SKUs

The data for 400,000 customers entailed their:

• Order history

• Name

• Email

• Address

Challenges

When we migrated the products, Natural Dog Co wanted to update their barcodes because their previous barcode system wasn’t working well for them. We had to make sure that we took orders into account since they would include old barcodes. In doing so, we changed the format to be with the requested prefix and mapped the old products and orders to that new barcode. 

On another note, Cart2Cart had some restrictions in the admin. We contacted their support team and worked with them to get everything finished. After running a few sets of tests, we were able to map it correctly. Lastly, we were working with a client that had over 500,000 orders. The high volume of orders made it so it took multiple days for everything to map. 

Elevating UX and UI

Right off the bat, the client wanted to ensure that the branding wasn’t so playful that it came across as immature or juvenile. Our experienced designers were excited to take on such a fun and clear set of guidelines. An animated tire swing footer, spinning icons, and colorful graphic design elements added to the overall appeal of Natural Dog Co as an approachable dog-friendly expert.

Another aspect requested by the client was that the site be designed so the modules had the capability to grow and increase in number over time. We were able to find the happy medium between simple, basic, and fun. Streamlining these brand standards created a dynamic online presence that combines playful colors with clean, modern minimalism.

Final Results

We evaluated many metrics after finishing their more-than-necessary migration. Here are the highlights seen six months after providing Natural Dog Company with our design and technical e-commerce services.

• 70% Lift in conversion

• +50% Increase in page speed

• 500% Six month ROI

“Avex was able to help with each aspect of the process from creative design aesthetics to custom code solutions for functionality issues.” - Bobby Reger

We have successfully bridged together Shopify e-commerce and WordPress content for Natural Dog Company, whose trusted expertise was brought to life like never before. Now that they have taken control over important parts of their e-commerce pages, there’s no limit to how much they can grow.