Northgate Cycles
A plugin-light WooCommerce rebuild for an independent bike shop, with live stock synced from the till and a bike-builder that actually understands compatible parts.
Overview
The brief
Northgate Cycles came to us with a site that had grown by accident — a theme, a page builder and a stack of plugins, each solving one problem and creating two more. It was slow, fragile to update, and the team had stopped trusting it.
The goal was simple to say and harder to do: rebuild it around the way the business actually works, keep it fast, and make it something the team could confidently run day to day.
Process
How we approached it
Discovery
Workshops with the team to map every workflow, every integration and every workaround — before a single line of code.
Design & build
A lean custom theme and purpose-built functionality in place of off-the-shelf plugins, delivered in fortnightly stages.
Launch & beyond
A zero-downtime launch on managed hosting, followed by a retained support plan for new features as the business grows.
Results
The outcome
- Increase in online revenue in the first quarter
- 42%
- Average page load, down from 5.8s
- 1.2s
- Plugins removed
- 11
Under the hood
Built to last
Everything is version controlled and deployed through staging, with automated backups and security monitoring on our managed hosting. Content editors get a flexible set of page blocks, and nothing they can do will break the layout.
- Custom theme with no page builder
- Purpose-built functionality in place of plugins
- Staging and live environments
- Ongoing support and development
