Migration · 8 weeks

GRH Kratom moved six years of rankings to Shopify without losing one.

Farm-to-market kratom and kava from a family-owned Southeast Asian farm, sold direct to American buyers. Hundreds of products and thousands of ranking pages had to leave WooCommerce without losing ground.

30-min call with a senior lead · Reply within 1 business day · NDA on request

GRH Kratom's Shopify store on desktop and phone: the GRH Kratom collection and the Green Maeng Da product page
Client
GRH Kratom & Botanicals
Sector
Kratom and botanicals
Market
United States
Timeline
8 weeks
Services
Shopify Development, Migration, SEO, CRO
+40%

Organic traffic

+45%

Conversion

As reported by the client.

01 The challenge

GRH Kratom & Botanicals grow kratom and kava on a family-owned farm in Southeast Asia and ship it direct to customers in the United States. Six years of writing about strain, origin and testing had done its work. Hundreds of products and thousands of pages ranked. Most orders began with a search rather than an advert.

WooCommerce had become the limit rather than the platform.

The catalogue was too large for it, pages were slow, and state-level shipping rules were handled by hand. Growth meant adding products, and adding products made the store slower. The business had outgrown the thing it was built on, and everyone involved knew it.

The obvious move was to rebuild and accept a ranking dip. That is what every quote they had received described, and it was offered as normal. For a store that lives on organic search, a dip is not a temporary cost. It is the year. That constraint set the brief before a single design decision was made.

02 Our approach

UX

This buyer reads the label before the price. Origin, batch number and lab result decide the purchase, and price only settles it afterwards. So we planned the product page around the questions asked first, with verification at the top and the price further down. The page had to answer a sceptic, not persuade a browser.

Technical

We treated the URL map as the deliverable and the theme as secondary. Six years of equity sits in addresses, not in a design. So the work started with an inventory of every page that ranked, matched to its new address, tested before launch. Nothing was allowed to go live pointing at a 404.

Conversion

Kratom cannot be shipped to every state. A cheaper build notes that in a footer and lets the customer discover it at checkout. We decided the restriction belonged on the product page and in the cart, because an order refused before payment costs a customer nothing. A refund after payment costs their trust.

03 Design & UX

Hierarchy on the product page follows the order the questions arrive in. Where the leaf was grown comes first, then the batch and the date it was tested, then what the certificate says. Strain, vein and harvest sit alongside. Price waits below all of it. Promotional badges and urgency counters were left out, because they undercut the argument the page is making.

On a phone the catalogue is where this audience spends its time, so filtering had to work with a thumb. Strain and vein filter first, format second. The shipping restriction shows in the product summary rather than behind a tap, so nobody scrolls a long page to learn they cannot order. Lab certificates open in place.

The GRH Kratom homepage on desktop

Verification above the price

Buyers in this category check origin and lab results before they look at cost, so the page answers in that order.

Restrictions where the buyer is

State rules appear on the product page and are enforced in the cart, so a blocked order is refused rather than refunded.

Strain and vein as filters

Regular buyers shop by strain, not by category name, so the filters use the words they already use themselves.

Batch data like a label

The certificate details are plain text in a fixed position, because a jar label is what this reader is used to reading.

Grh Kratom brand board: logo, colour palette, typography, kratom leaf harvest and the product range

04 Development & technical implementation

The store was rebuilt on Shopify and the catalogue moved with Matrixify, products, variants and content together. The redirect map was the larger piece of work. Every ranking URL was inventoried and matched, including orphaned pages nobody had linked to for years that still brought in visitors. The 301 map was tested against the live index before launch.

State-level shipping rules were built into the store rather than added as an app. The restriction renders on the product page from the same source that blocks the cart, so the two cannot drift apart. Search Console and GA4 were watched daily through launch week, which is how the client could see that positions had held.

The lab certificates existed as loose PDF files that nobody could match to a batch. We rebuilt them as structured product data, so a customer holding a jar can reach the certificate for that batch. The matching was manual and slow, and the client did most of it themselves. That work set the pace, and the store went live in 8 weeks.

Close-ups of the GRH build: the product buy box, the state shipping notice and the batch lab result link

05Key solutions

Key solutions.

The parts of the build a visitor would point at.

  1. 01

    Batch lab verification

    Every product links to the certificate for the batch in hand, so verification takes one tap instead of an email.

  2. 02

    State shipping enforced early

    Restricted states are flagged on the product page and blocked in the cart, so orders are refused before payment rather than refunded after.

  3. 03

    Farm origin on the page

    Growing region, harvest and vein sit with the product, which is the detail this buyer looks for before anything else.

  4. 04

    Filtering by strain

    Shoppers narrow a long catalogue by strain, vein and format, using the words they already say rather than shop categories.

  5. 05

    Faster catalogue pages

    The long browse pages this audience lives on now load quickly, which keeps sessions going deeper into the catalogue.

  6. 06

    Complete redirect map

    Every ranking address from the old store has a tested destination on the new one, so nothing arrives at a dead page.

06The result

The result.

What changed after launch.

+40%

Organic traffic

No rankings were lost in the move. Six years of authority arrived intact, and organic traffic is now up 40%. That gain is not new content doing the work. It is the same pages on a faster store, holding positions they already held and taking ground the old build was too slow to reach.

+45%

Conversion

Conversion is up 45%. Buyers who can see origin, batch and lab verification without hunting for them stop leaving the page to check elsewhere. In a category where trust is the purchase, that is the whole gain. The same traffic now produces more orders, which is worth more than the traffic rise on its own.

Not sure where to start?

Tell us the number that is stuck. A senior lead replies within one business day with an honest view, free.

Book a free consultation

or WhatsApp +91 70034 16634

9.9/10 client score · 150+ projects · 100% on time

07The finished site

The finished site.

Live, and running the business it was built for.

Visit the live site (opens in a new tab)
The finished GRH Kratom store on phones: collection, product, lab results and our story

08In their words

Every quote we took told us to expect a drop in traffic after the move. We did not get one, and we watched daily.

Kemal Whyte
Kemal WhyteFounder, GRH Kratom & Botanicals

09Tech stack

Tech stack.

What it is built on, and what it talks to.

  • Shopify
  • WooCommerce
  • Matrixify
  • Liquid
  • Search Console
  • GA4

10More case studies

More case studies.

Other projects where we named the number before we started.

Migration

Cocoon Care left WooCommerce and more than doubled its conversion rate.

Hundreds of bamboo babywear products, tens of thousands of orders and years of rankings, moved off a slow WooCommerce build onto a store built for phones.

Conversion, from 1.5%
3.5%
Organic traffic
+30%
View case study

Migration

King K Kratom rebuilt its store with compliance built in, not bolted on.

Lab-verified kratom extracts sold with age gating and state shipping rules bolted on by plugins. Rebuilt on Shopify so compliance is part of the store itself.

Organic traffic
+25%
Conversion
+3.5%
View case study

Migration

Kampura kept every ranking page and added the checkout it never had.

Years of writing about origin and ceremony brought the traffic. Nothing on the site could take a payment. Shopify fixed the second without touching the first.

Organic traffic
+55%
Faster load
3×
View case study

11Start a project

Let us look at your numbers.

Send the metric that is stuck and we will tell you honestly whether we agree.

  1. Within 1 business dayWe read it properly and reply with real questions, not a templated brochure.
  2. A 30-minute scoping callFree, no obligation. We tell you honestly if we are the wrong fit.
  3. A written proposalScope, timeline, deliverables and the success metric, all on one page.

You'll hear back from a senior lead, never a bot.

    What do you need?

    NDA on request · Details never shared

    Question about your project? Tell us in 30 seconds and a senior lead replies.