Bella Moda —
+340% Conversions
in 90 Days

The Challenge

Bella Moda had a loyal customer base and a strong product range — but their website was letting them down badly. Built in 2018 and never properly updated, the store was slow, confusing to navigate and essentially unusable on mobile. Traffic was there. Conversions weren't.

Our Approach

We started with a full UX audit — heatmaps, session recordings and interviews with 12 real customers. The data told a clear story: people wanted to buy but the website made it too hard. Our redesign focused on three things: speed, clarity and trust.

We migrated to a faster host, implemented image compression and lazy loading, removed 14 redundant plugins and achieved a 98/100 PageSpeed score on desktop. Checkout went from 7 steps to 3. We added guest checkout as default, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and an AI recommendation engine powered by Claude that shows relevant products based on browsing behaviour.

Our Methodology

The rebuild ran across twelve weeks in five phases, each with a tight scope and a written deliverable signed off before moving on.

Phase 1 · Discovery (weeks 1–2)

The first two weeks were diagnosis only. The heatmaps confirmed customers were reaching product pages but stalling at the add-to-cart step. Session recordings showed the seven-step checkout was the abandonment point — most users gave up at step three, where the mandatory account creation lived. The customer interviews made it explicit: shoppers liked the products but trusted the site too little to enter card details on something that, in their words, “looked broken on my phone.”

Phase 2 · Architecture & design (weeks 3–5)

We restructured the information architecture around mobile-first patterns and rebuilt the design system to match Bella Moda's existing print materials, so the digital storefront finally felt like the same brand. Checkout collapsed from seven steps to three, with guest checkout set as the default and account creation moved to a post-purchase invitation instead of a pre-purchase barrier.

Phase 3 · Build & integration (weeks 6–9)

The new front-end was built on WooCommerce. We migrated the store to a faster host, implemented image compression and lazy loading throughout, and removed fourteen redundant plugins that had accumulated over the previous five years. Apple Pay and Google Pay were integrated as one-tap checkout options. A Claude-powered product recommendation engine went live on product and cart pages, surfacing relevant items based on real-time browsing behaviour rather than generic best-sellers.

Phase 4 · Testing & launch (weeks 10–11)

The rebuilt store went through cross-device testing and page-speed optimisation against a defined performance budget. The final desktop PageSpeed score landed at 98 out of 100, with mobile page-load down from 8.4 seconds to 2.1 — a fivefold improvement that put the experience back inside the three-second window above which conversions start bleeding.

Phase 5 · Monitor & iterate (week 12 onward)

After launch we tracked KPIs against the pre-rebuild baseline. By day 30 the conversion rate had already doubled. By day 90 the cumulative lift reached the 340% headline above, with cart abandonment falling from 82% to 37% and mobile revenue growing 180%.

The Results

Within 30 days of launch, conversions had already doubled. By the 90-day mark, Bella Moda had achieved a 340% increase in conversion rate — from 0.4% to 1.76%. Cart abandonment fell from 82% to 37%. Mobile revenue grew by 180%.