Ironclad Pan Co - Website Refresh

"Absolutely outstanding. Nothing was ever too much trouble and Jeanine was so patient with us. We are completely confident that we are safe in her capable hands. Looking forward to continuing to work together."
Kate Slavin - Design Director @ Ironclad Pan Co

Background

Ironclad Co are renowned for their premium cast iron cookware, endorsed by well-known chefs around the world. Their site just wasn't reflecting their brand due to performance issues and it was difficult to maintain in the backend.

The site was based on a paid Shopify theme, however, there had been a number of different developers (and non-develpers!) working on the site over the years. An attempt had been made to set up metafields to store additional info for product pages but they weren't implemented properly on the site - and the current theme had over 100 individual product templates! This made the site very difficult to update easily and also bloated the theme code.

Home page before:

The Brief

The current site was also running extremely slow and failing all core web vitals. This was mainly due to an excessive number of videos on the home page of the site, a page locking app that wasn't being used and had leftover code in the site and a page builder app. A quick fix was done to reduce the number of videos on the home page (and also product pages) and we removed the page locking app code as well as a stop gap.

Then we completed a full website audit and went ahead with a plan for a full upgrade/refresh.

The Project

The main project was to rebuild the site - either on a new paid theme or the latest version of the current paid theme, starting with a fresh copy. After reviewing the quality of the coding in the theme, we choose the later - rebuild the site on a new fresh copy of the theme. No need to pay for a new theme, if the existing theme is suitable but just needs to be set up properly taking performance, design and ease of updates into consideration.

We used as much of theme's in-built functionality as we could and only re-coded the custom features that just couldn't be achieved with the theme's native functionality. Ease of future theme upgrades was always in mind and making it easy for the client to update themselves.

Website after:

The Results

Now the site is passing all core web vitals on mobile and desktop on all key pages, running so much faster and is going to be far easier for the client to manage updates now going forward.

We've loved working with Kate and Sarah on this project and look forward to continuing to work with them to help grow their online store and expand into other countries!