Moving from Elementor: a faster, future-ready WooCommerce store for an NZ supplement brand

MyVitality had grown, and its store needed to grow with it. The site had been built on Elementor, a drag-and-drop page builder, and over the years more than 40 plugins had been added to handle new features. That’s a common path for a growing shop, but each addition brings more code to load and more to keep in step, and speed matters most on mobile, where most supplement shoppers browse.

At the same time, online stores everywhere are facing a growing wave of automated bot traffic, from scrapers to login attacks, and MyVitality wanted a store built to stand up to it.

For a business that relies on repeat orders and subscriptions, the next step was clear: a store that’s quick, dependable and easy for the team to look after, with room to keep growing.

Started with the brand. We created MyVitality’s brand guidelines (colours, type, tone and how the products are presented), then designed the new store from wireframes up. The homepage design was handed over with a full developer spec written to WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards, so the store is easy to use for everyone.

Rebuilt on Base89. We moved MyVitality onto Base89, our own WordPress framework built for faster, more secure websites that stay easy to maintain for the long term. The theme is hand-built and compiled, so each page only loads the code it actually needs.

Moved to native WordPress blocks. Pages are now built from custom WordPress blocks designed for MyVitality’s brand: product heroes, bundles, the science pages and the health-goal quiz. The team can edit copy, images and sections in the standard editor without a developer, and each block loads only the code it needs.

Cut the plugins. We went through all 41 plugins one by one, kept the 14 that genuinely earned their place, and replaced the rest with lean, purpose-built code. That leaves fewer moving parts and smoother updates.

Made subscriptions a headline feature. Repeat customers are the heart of MyVitality’s business, so subscribe-and-save sits front and centre on every product. Customers choose how often they want each order, see the saving straight away, and can pause or change their subscription themselves. Behind the scenes, the team gets a renewals dashboard showing what’s due and what needs attention.

Added quantity pricing: buy more, save more. Each product can have its own quantity tiers, set by the team in the product editor, so customers buying two, three or more automatically get a better price per item. The buy box updates live as they change the quantity, showing the saving as they go, and it works hand in hand with subscribe-and-save, so customers always see the right price whichever way they buy. It’s built into the theme rather than bolted on with another plugin.

Built a Product Finder Quiz. Choosing the right supplement can be daunting, so we built a quiz that works like a knowledgeable in-store assistant. Five quick questions about goals, lifestyle, format and budget lead to a tailored recommendation, from a single product up to a full bundle. It’s framed around goals, never symptoms, so it helps customers choose without making health claims. Customers can save their results by email and unlock the welcome offer, and the team gets a quiz dashboard showing which answers and recommendations are most popular.

Moved the store across cleanly. We built the new store on a fresh install and moved across everything that mattered: every customer account, years of order history, saved payment details and every active subscription. We wrote our own migration tooling for it, so on the day the switchover took minutes. Customers logged in as normal and their subscriptions kept renewing on schedule, with no one having to re-subscribe or re-enter a card. For a subscription business, that seamless switch was the most important part of the move. Product pages were mapped to their new homes so existing Google rankings and customers’ bookmarks kept working.

Brought the platform up to date. The new store runs the latest WordPress, WooCommerce and PHP, including WooCommerce’s newer, faster order storage. That’s a big part of why the admin side feels quicker too.

Built in the foundations. Clean page titles and meta, product schema, a sitemap, accurate analytics and modern security headers were all part of the build from day one.

Built for a world of bots. A large and growing share of traffic to any online store isn’t human. Bots scrape prices, hammer login and checkout pages, probe for weak spots and, at worst, flood a site until it slows down for real customers. We built the new store to stand up to that:

• A smaller target. Fewer plugins, a current and fully patched platform, and protective security headers mean far less for attackers to work with.
• Detect & Protect. The store is watched by Detect & Protect, the security monitoring built into our own Cardo. platform. It learns what normal traffic looks like for the store, spots bad bots and attack patterns such as login attacks and traffic floods, and blocks them before they reach the site. Login and sign-up forms also have an invisible bot check, which stops automated sign-ups and password-guessing without making real customers solve puzzles.
• Fast for real customers. Turning away bad bots cuts the load on the server, so the store stays quick for the people who are actually shopping.

Got the tracking right. Good marketing decisions need good data, so we rebuilt MyVitality’s tracking in Google Tag Manager from the ground up. Every key step is now recorded accurately in GA4 (product views, add-to-cart, checkout and every completed purchase, counted once), and duplicate tags and conflicting product data were cleaned out. That gives Google and Meta clean, reliable sales data to optimise their ad campaigns against.

And the details that make a store run smoothly:

• Reviews and trust on every product. Every customer review was matched to the right product page, and products now have clear tabs for ingredients, lab testing, benefits, how to use and who it’s for.
• A custom-built contact form. No form plugin. The contact form is built into the theme, with several layers of quiet spam protection that filter out bots without making customers jump through hoops. Every enquiry is saved in the dashboard as well as emailed, so nothing gets lost in an inbox.
• Newsletter built in. Sign-ups flow straight into Mailchimp with double opt-in and an automatic 20% welcome code, with no extra plugin.
• Subscription reminders. Customers get a friendly heads-up a few days before each renewal, with an easy way to change, swap or pause.
• Shipping to the world. Every shipping zone, including Australia, was set up with its own rates and free-shipping thresholds.
• A smooth checkout. Stripe and Afterpay carried across, and customers’ original order numbers kept so their order history still matches.

In our site audit, performance is up 57%, the SEO score has more than doubled, and pages are much lighter. MyVitality now has a store that’s faster and easier to look after. Updates are straightforward, the team can edit the site themselves, and the platform is set up to grow with them. Subscriptions and quantity pricing make it easy for customers to buy more and come back, and Detect & Protect keeps bad bots out so the store stays fast and safe.

In the client’s words, the result was “an increase in traffic and sales showing in the first week”.

With the foundations and tracking in place, our Growth work (SEO, Google Ads, Meta ads and email) drives traffic to a store built to convert it, and the ad platforms now learn from accurate sales data. Since we took over MyVitality’s Google and Meta ad campaigns, return on ad spend has grown 250%.

You can see the finished site at myvitality.co.nz.