From Shopify to WordPress: migrating and growing an online plant nursery from near zero
An online plant nursery ecommerce was competing against well-established players in the green sector and needed a fundamental change. The strategy: migrate from Shopify to WordPress for technical freedom, target transactional categories with less competition, strengthen the technical foundation from the ground up, and build E-E-A-T through backlinks and a blog designed to convert.
The challenge
The client started with three heavily limiting constraints:
- Almost from scratchin organic visibility.
- Competing against established playersin the green sector with years of accumulated SEO.
- Technical limitations in Shopifythat held back the technical SEO foundation required (URL control, templates, crawling).
- A tight budget:we had to be very selective about where each unit of effort went.
How we approached it
The first step was a carefully planned SEO migration from Shopify to WordPress which, beyond the platform change, served to improve the site’s technical foundation and architecture. From there, the focus went on categories and the blog.
SEO migration Shopify → WordPress
Matching the highest-traffic URLs, cleaning up dead URLs, controlled 301 redirects and post-migration QA. Improved crawling and indexing plus a stronger technical base.
Transactional categories with less competition
Creating many new categories and subcategories aimed at transactional queries with less competition. Focused on the products with the highest margin for the store, not on volume.
Transactional blog + backlinks (the only lever)
A blog built to support the categories with content that improves E-E-A-T and pushes users towards purchase. Because of the budget, careful link building was the only external authority lever available.
On that foundation: an initial audit, keyword research prioritising profitability, benchmarking against the established green-sector players, well-orchestrated Product + Offer schemas and Google Merchant, and thorough crawl and indexation monitoring.
Visual results
Organic traffic and ranking keyword growth over the course of the project (Ahrefs screenshots, client brand anonymised):
Organic traffic grows from ~1,000 to around 34,000 visits a month, with a very marked acceleration in the final stretch. Ranking keywords sit at around 16,000, with close to 8,000 in the top 20: a broad, well-placed visibility base that sustains the store’s growth.
What we achieved
- A migration with no losses.Moved from Shopify to WordPress without losing authority, and improved the site’s crawling and indexing.
- Growth from near zero.Sustained organic growth from an almost non-existent starting point in a sector with well-established players.
- A focus on profitability.Improved visibility in the categories and products delivering the most margin, not in vanity metrics.
Shall we talk about your project?
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