- +320%
Increase in organic sessions
An online retailer selling Indian wedding invitations to customers in the US had a product people wanted and a website holding it back. The store ran on a custom PHP build that was slow and awkward on phones, and Google struggled to crawl it. We moved it to Shopify, rebuilt the SEO foundations as part of the move, and compared the three months after launch with the same three months a year earlier. The difference was big. Our analytics data showed organic traffic up 280% and overall revenue up 320%. And the store took the number one spot on Google for its main searches, including “Indian wedding cards” and “Indian wedding invitations”.
| Client | Online retailer of Indian wedding invitations (anonymous at the client’s request) |
|---|---|
| Market | United States |
| Old platform | Custom PHP |
| New platform | Shopify |
| Services | SEO, Shopify development, Shopify migration, Shopify SEO |
| Measured | 3 months after launch vs the same 3 months the year before |
Who was the client?
An established ecommerce brand selling Indian wedding cards and invitations, mostly to families in the US planning Indian weddings, with a catalogue customers liked and steady demand behind it. Trouble was, the site underneath couldn’t keep up with either.
What was holding the store back?
Mostly the custom PHP platform, which had fallen behind. Pages loaded slowly and the mobile experience was weak, which matters a lot when couples scroll through invitation designs on their phones in between everything else a wedding involves. Underneath that sat the SEO problems:
- A messy URL structure that made products and categories hard to organise
- No schema markup on product pages
- Crawl and indexing issues, with some pages not making it into Google at all
- Key product and category pages buried deep in the results
- Organic conversions sliding, even though demand stayed steady
Patching the old platform would have meant paying a developer to fight the same tangled code for every single fix, month after month, with no end in sight. Moving was the better bet.
What did we do?
We migrated the store from custom PHP to Shopify and treated the move as an SEO rebuild rather than just a change of software. Doing both together meant the new site launched with the structure fixed, not with the old problems copied across.
The work covered:
- Moving the catalogue and store off custom PHP and onto Shopify
- Technical SEO across site structure and schema, plus crawlability
- UX and performance improvements aimed at conversions
- Content aligned to what US customers search for, like “Indian wedding invitations”
A dedicated account manager kept things moving between our team and the client during the migration, so the store could keep taking orders while the new site was built and tested behind the scenes.
Services Used:
STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
Business impact
Since partnering with Sky Storm Digital, The Brand has witnessed a significant improvement in organic search traffic to their website, resulting in higher conversion rates and sales revenue.
Organic traffic increased
Overall revenue increased
Increase new users from organic traffic
What can other stores take from this?
Mostly that a migration is the cheapest moment to fix your SEO. You’re rebuilding the site anyway. Fixing URLs and adding schema while you’re at it costs very little extra, while doing it later means a second round of changes and redirects.
Done badly, it’s the opposite. Rankings can vanish overnight, so plan it as an SEO project from day one, and read our URL migration guide plus the Shopify mistakes that slow stores down before you launch. If you’d like us to run the move, our ecommerce development team handles Shopify migrations with SEO built in.
- Migration from PhP to Shopify
- Technical SEO improvements across site structure, schema, and crawlability
- UX & performance enhancements to improve conversion rates
- Content alignment for search relevance
