Case study · Gourmet food & wellness · eCommerce
A 13.9 MB store that took 13 seconds to paint on a phone. We rebuilt it lean, compliant and measurable.
AustraliaeCommerce rebuild & performanceLive · ongoing
The situation
Hubert Gourmet is a well-established gourmet food and wellness business with a real wholesale operation behind it — but its online store was working against it. Built on a heavy WordPress theme stacked with page-builder and slider plugins, the homepage weighed 13.9 MB and took 13.5 seconds to paint on mobile. Product images were low-resolution, the checkout and contact paths leaned on plain email links, and — critically — analytics had never actually been installed, so nobody could see what the store was doing.
What was at stake
For an online store, a 13-second mobile load isn't a performance nitpick — it's the shop door jammed shut. Most visitors never see the products. And with no analytics at all, every decision was a guess: no way to know what people looked at, where they dropped off, or whether anything worked. You can't improve what you can't measure, and this business couldn't measure a thing.
What we did
We moved off the heavy depot theme onto a clean Kadence child theme, stripped the page-builder bloat, and put a CDN layer in front. The result: mobile load time roughly halved, page weight cut hard, and cumulative layout shift eliminated to zero. An interim CDN-only pass had already pulled the mobile paint down to under four seconds within days, with zero downtime.
The supplier's full 600-file photo library was catalogued and the store re-shot in HD — dozens of product images swapped for current, high-resolution packaging, category heroes and lifestyle shots. A premium range finally looked premium.
Returns and shipping policies were rewritten to be consumer-law and Google-Merchant compliant, the wellness range was remediated to meet advertising rules, and proper enquiry and wholesale forms replaced the old mailto links — so the store could actually be advertised and fed into shopping channels.
We stood up the full stack the old site never had: Tag Manager, GA4 with WooCommerce enhanced e-commerce tracking (views, add-to-cart, checkout, purchase), key-event conversions, and region-gated consent so the analytics are clean. For the first time, every click in the store is visible.
The proof
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile largest paint | 13.5s | 4.1s | −70% |
| Desktop largest paint | — | 1.0s | perf 92/100 |
| Google SEO score | 85 | 100 | +15 |
| Cumulative Layout Shift | poor | 0 | eliminated |
| Product & lifestyle imagery | low-res | HD | 38+ swapped |
| Analytics / conversion tracking | none installed | full GA4 + e-commerce |
Baseline captured on the old WordPress stack; “after” from the live rebuilt store (PageSpeed Insights, 2026-07-16). The store stays on WordPress (Kadence): mobile paint measures ~4–7s run-to-run depending on cache state, desktop is a stable 1.0s — the win is a lean, compliant, measurable build, with performance work ongoing.
The result
The store is faster, looks like the premium brand it represents, complies with the rules that let it be advertised, and — for the first time — reports on itself. Within 24 hours of the relaunch and a reactivation campaign, the first direct-to-consumer orders came through the rebuilt store, one from each side of the range. It's the foundation the marketing programme runs on.
What this means for you
An online store that loads slowly, can't be measured and can't be legally advertised is a shopfront with the lights off. Rebuilding it lean and measurable isn't cosmetic — it's the precondition for every marketing dollar after it working. We build the store and the measurement together, so growth is provable.
Book a call. We'll audit your load time, your tracking and your compliance, and show you what's costing you sales.