Testimonial from Helen Round
"When a large part of your business relies on having a successful and easy-to-use website, the idea of making major changes can be quite daunting. We’d had our WordPress site for about six years — it had generally served us well, but it never quite did everything we wanted, and there were always little niggles that gave me sleepless nights.
Having previously worked with Elliot on an SEO project, I approached him to help us migrate our existing site to Shopify. It was a delicate process, but one that was expertly handled from start to finish. Elliot worked hard to meet our timeframe, always responded promptly to questions, and was available at the end of the phone when more in-depth conversations were needed.
Through a series of Zoom workshops, he trained our team on how to use the new platform and made himself available for any follow-up questions or support. Preserving our existing SEO was crucial, and he ensured that everything transferred correctly, without any negative impact on our rankings.
Elliot is a fantastic listener, an excellent communicator, and incredibly reliable. He meets deadlines, replies to emails quickly, and is simply a lovely person to work with. I’m really glad we found Elliot and chose him to build our Shopify website. His experience, measured advice, and ongoing support have played a huge part in helping our online business grow.
We now have a website that’s easy for us to update, straightforward for our customers to use, visually impressive, and ranking better than ever before."
Project Summary
WordPress to Shopify
I first met Helen while delivering digital marketing support as part of a government-funded scheme. Our initial discussion centred on search engine optimisation (SEO) and some of the issues she was experiencing with her existing WordPress website, which had been built by another designer. Following a series of SEO, speed, and performance tests, a number of recommendations were made to address the problems.
Some time later, Helen got back in touch with questions about Shopify and whether it might be a better fit for her business than WordPress, particularly for e-commerce. After a detailed conversation about the advantages, the decision was made to make the switch.
As with any website migration, protecting the site's search engine ranking was a top priority. The data was carefully reviewed, prepared, and converted for the new platform. The main challenge came from the original WordPress website, which had been built using a visual editor and bespoke code. This meant that the content could not be migrated in its existing form. Every product and blog post had to be manually adjusted to ensure it functioned correctly on Shopify.
With over 1,000 individual pages on the Helen Round website, each one required a manual check and adjustment before going live. Many hours were spent getting everything just right — but the end result was a faster, more stable, and fully optimised site ready for growth on Shopify.
Another complicating factor in the project was the need to provide functionality for both wholesale and retail customers. This required different types of customer accounts, variable pricing structures, order quantity rules, and geographic tax differences — none of which are standard features in the core Shopify package.
Shopify’s own wholesale solution, part of its Shopify Plus offering, comes with a hosting cost of $24,000 per year, making it inaccessible to most small businesses. Instead, we delivered a comparable wholesale experience using a combination of carefully chosen third-party apps and custom coding, all at a fraction of that cost.
Working with Helen has been an absolute pleasure. She’s always positive, curious, and eager to learn. One of the first things she did was sign up for Shopify tutorials and start exploring what else the platform could offer. Every so often, I’ll receive an email from Helen saying she’s discovered a new Shopify announcement or app that might help her customers — a clear sign of her proactive and customer-focused mindset.
That’s one of the great strengths of Shopify: it puts control firmly in the hands of the business owner. And all the recurring issues tied to the old WordPress site disappeared the moment the new Shopify site went live.
It’s also clear that Helen and her team are always striving to do the very best for their customers. That commitment is infectious, and throughout the project, they really made me feel like part of their team.