MerBart is a Norwegian sticker brand that needed more than a simple redesign. Their website was struggling with slow performance, a clunky user experience, and serious technical limitations around order management — especially with large, customized orders involving user-uploaded logos.
The goal was to create a faster, more intuitive shopping experience that aligned with the brand’s aesthetic and could handle their growing order volume without crashing.
Objectives
- Redesign the site UI to improve user experience across desktop and mobile
- Optimize website speed and server performance
- Align colors and design with the brand identity
- Build custom functionality for complex WooCommerce orders
- Transition from shared hosting to a cloud-based architecture
- Implement on-page SEO improvements and modern frontend best practices
Approach
I developed the entire website from scratch using a custom WordPress theme and fully tailored CSS. Every page was rebuilt with performance and UX in mind, from product browsing to checkout.
To address the client's recurring issue with laggy invoice generation, I built a custom PDF invoice plugin from the ground up. This plugin dynamically renders all order information — including uploaded logos and custom fields — and eliminates the bottlenecks caused by bloated third-party plugins. The result was smoother performance and full visibility into large customer orders, even at scale.
On the infrastructure side, I migrated the website to AWS Lightsail, set up a custom Ubuntu environment, and offloaded image assets to Amazon S3 with CloudFront CDN integration for fast, global delivery.
Performance optimization included:
- Lazy loading for images
- Image compression with WebP fallback
- Minified CSS/JS
- Structured HTML with clean, semantic markup
- Technical SEO setup (metadata, schema, clean URLs)
Results
The redesign delivered a measurable impact across both performance and sales:
- 4× faster page load speeds across product and checkout pages
- Seamless admin experience even with large orders and uploads
- Reported 2× increase in sales since launch
- Reduced support tickets related to checkout and invoice generation
- Mobile bounce rate decreased noticeably (according to client’s analytics)