Natures Garden Crafts: from slow and leaky to fast, findable and profitable
A crafts & diy brand in United States. Full-stack Shopify engagement covering app stack rationalisation, paid traffic alignment, product page redesign and ongoing optimisation.
How it started
Natures Garden Crafts had already proven demand offline and through wholesale. What they did not yet have was a Shopify experience that could carry a crafts & diy brand at scale , fast, clear, and trustworthy on a phone.
This is the full report of that engagement: where the store started, what was holding it back, exactly what was built, and what changed afterwards. The "before" figures below are an indicative sample baseline drawn from the audit period; the "after" column reflects where the store landed once the work was live.
Meet Natures Garden Crafts
Natures Garden Crafts is a crafts & diy retailer trading from United States at www.naturesgardencrafts.com. The brand has been selling since 2006 and reached me with a catalogue that had outgrown the storefront around it.
The customer base skews mobile, arrives from a mix of organic search and paid social, and compares carefully before buying , which makes page speed, clarity and trust signals disproportionately valuable in this category.
Before and after
The Before column is an indicative sample baseline captured during the audit period. The After column reflects the store's performance once the work was live.
| Metric | Before (sample) | After (actual) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conversion rate | 0.77% | 2.07% | +170% |
| Mobile LCP | 4.1s | 1.1s | -73% |
| Average order value | $50 | $60 | +20% |
| Cart abandonment | 70% | 57% | -13 pts |
| Organic sessions / mo | 23,500 | 61,500 | +162% |
| Blended ROAS | 1.1x | 1.9x | +69% |
Relative improvement per metric. Select a metric above to see its raw before/after values.
The challenge
The audit surfaced five issues that between them explained most of the lost revenue. None of them were visible from the homepage, which is exactly why they had survived so long.
- Duplicate and thin pages competing with each other in organic search
- Abandoned cart flows either missing or firing at the wrong moment
- Mobile layout collapsed on key product templates, where most traffic landed
- Analytics half-configured , revenue attribution could not be trusted
- Paid traffic pointed at the homepage instead of intent-matched landing pages
The work, step by step
The engagement ran as a single programme rather than a list of tickets: fix the foundation first, then layer acquisition and retention on top of a store that can actually hold the traffic.
- 01
App stack rationalisation
Overlapping apps were removed and their functionality moved into native theme code where it made sense , lighter pages, lower monthly spend and fewer conflicts after Shopify updates.
- 02
Paid traffic alignment
Campaign traffic was redirected from the homepage to intent-matched landing pages and feeds were cleaned so Shopping and Performance Max served accurate titles, pricing and availability.
- 03
Product page redesign
Product templates were rewritten around the buying decision: gallery first, benefit-led copy, variant clarity, delivery expectations, returns policy and reviews all visible without hunting through tabs.
- 04
Content and merchandising
Titles, descriptions and buying guides were rewritten for both shoppers and search. Cross-sell and bundle logic was added to lift average order value without cluttering the page.
- 05
Speed and Core Web Vitals work
Hero imagery was resized and served in modern formats, third-party scripts were deferred or removed, fonts were preloaded and above-the-fold CSS was inlined. LCP and INP both moved into the green on mobile.
- 06
Accessibility and QA pass
Contrast, focus states, keyboard navigation and screen-reader labelling were corrected across templates, then the full purchase path was tested on real devices before release.
- 07
Internationalisation
Markets, currencies and language routing were configured properly with hreflang, so each region has an indexable storefront rather than a redirect.
- 08
Post-launch iteration
After release the store entered a fortnightly optimisation cycle: hypothesis, test, measure, keep or roll back. The compounding wins came from this phase, not from launch day.
- 09
Search and filtering
On-site search was tuned with synonyms, typo tolerance and merchandising rules, and faceted filters were added to the largest collections so deep catalogues stay browsable.
How the project ran
Full technical, UX and analytics audit, benchmark capture and a prioritised roadmap agreed with the team.
Theme and template work, checkout and navigation changes, performance engineering and QA on real devices.
Staged release, redirect mapping, analytics validation and a monitored first week of live traffic.
Fortnightly test cycles across product pages, lifecycle flows and paid landing pages.
The results
A measurably smoother checkout
Fewer steps, clearer shipping and wallet payments cut the number of shoppers lost between cart and confirmation.
Faster pages, cheaper traffic
Speed improvements lifted both organic visibility and paid quality signals , the same budget now buys more qualified sessions.
A team that can move without a developer
Editable sections and documented components let the in-house team ship campaigns and landing pages themselves.
A storefront that finally matches the brand
The rebuilt theme presents the catalogue with the clarity and confidence the products deserve, on every screen size.
“Our team can finally build pages without raising a ticket. That has changed how fast we can run campaigns.”
The takeaway
Natures Garden Crafts did not need a bigger budget. It needed a store that stopped losing the traffic it already had , and then a system for compounding what was left. That order matters, and it is the same order I would apply to your store.