Bespoke Woo & JS box builder for retail site.
Build your own chocolate boxes custom functionality
What did Cocoapod need?
Cocoapod sells chocolate gifts online. Their flagship feature is a custom box builder that lets customers personalise their order. The existing site was on BigCommerce and the box builder was hard to manage and impossible to evolve without developer support.
The box builder is the commercial heart of the Cocoapod experience. Customers select flavours, characters and patterns, add personalised text, and build a gift that feels genuinely theirs. It is the kind of feature that drives repeat purchases and average order value – but only if it works smoothly, reflects the current product range, and the team can update it themselves when new options are added.
On BigCommerce, none of that was possible without developer involvement. The platform was also limiting the site’s SEO potential and the blog was not working well as a content and discovery tool.
The brief was a full platform migration and rebuild: move to WordPress and WooCommerce, redesign the site for better conversion, rebuild the box builder in JavaScript so it matches the existing behaviour but is fully editable internally, and use the migration as an opportunity to improve SEO foundations across 250 products and 54 categories.
What the project needed to deliver:
- Full migration from BigCommerce to WordPress and WooCommerce without losing search performance
- A rebuilt custom box builder that matches the current user experience but is fully editable by the Cocoapod team
- A full redesign focused on usability, mobile conversion and a clean journey from discovery to checkout
- Improved SEO across 250 products and 54 categories with careful URL mapping to protect rankings
- A stronger blog experience to support content marketing and organic discovery
Our approach
Project overview
A full platform migration and redesign – BigCommerce to WordPress and WooCommerce. 250 products, 54 categories, a bespoke JavaScript box builder, SEO-protected URL migration, and a full redesign to improve conversion and mobile experience.
Design
- Full redesign from concept through to approval – not a visual refresh but a commercial improvement
- Focus on speed, mobile usability and a clean journey from product discovery through to checkout
- Product templates and category navigation designed to keep a 250-product catalogue browsable, particularly on mobile
- Seasonal and occasion-led collections properly structured and easy to navigate
Box builder
- Custom ‘build a box’ feature rebuilt from scratch in JavaScript – same behaviour as the existing site, fully editable internally
- Cocoapod team can edit characters, flavours, patterns and pattern selection without developer support
- Configurable on a per-product basis – different box types can have different options
- Customer text entry fields supported, with the ability to review and edit their design from the cart
WooCommerce
Full WooCommerce setup covering product management, stock, promotions, cart and checkout. Product and category structure planned carefully before migration to ensure the new architecture is cleaner and more SEO-friendly than what it replaces. 250 products and 54 categories migrated and validated.
SEO and migration
Existing search performance reviewed using domain reporting before migration began. Key pages and category URLs mapped carefully to minimise ranking disruption. Internal linking improved throughout. Blog rebuilt as a proper content and discovery platform. SEO was treated as part of the core build – not an afterthought applied at launch.
On BigCommerce and outgrowing it?
If your ecommerce platform is limiting your ability to manage products, evolve custom features or improve search performance – we should talk.
Tell us what you have and we will tell you what a move to WooCommerce would look like.
The results
95/100
Google PageSpeed score on mobile and desktop at launch
250
Products migrated from BigCommerce and restructured in WooCommerce across 54 categories
Editable
Box builder fully manageable by the Cocoapod team – characters, flavours, patterns and personalisation options updated without developer support
Redesigned
Full redesign for conversion and mobile usability – not a visual refresh, a commercial improvement
Protected
Existing search rankings protected through careful URL mapping and SEO-first migration planning
Woo
Replaced – a platform that was limiting product management, custom features and SEO replaced with one that does not
Technical details
WordPress and WooCommerce
Built on our own bare-bones WordPress starter theme with WooCommerce handling the full ecommerce layer – product management, stock, promotions, cart and checkout. Before any design work goes in, we run the blank theme through Google PageSpeed Insights and aim for 100 out of 100 on both mobile and desktop. On a WooCommerce site with 250 products, that discipline is what separates a fast site from a slow one.
Custom box builder
Bespoke JavaScript box builder integrated directly with WooCommerce. The builder replicates the existing BigCommerce behaviour exactly – same customer experience, same personalisation flow – but every configurable element is now editable by the Cocoapod team through the WordPress admin. Characters, flavours, patterns, text fields and per-product configuration all managed internally.
Product and category structure
WooCommerce product and category structure planned before migration began – not recreated from BigCommerce but rethought for clarity, SEO and long-term manageability. 250 products across 54 categories including seasonal and occasion-led collections, all validated post-migration.
SEO and URL mapping
Existing search performance audited before migration. URL structure mapped carefully – every page with ranking equity has a redirect in place. Internal linking improved throughout the new architecture. The migration was planned to protect what the site had already earned in search and improve on it going forward.
Why WordPress and WooCommerce were the right platform for Cocoapod.
The box builder is the reason Cocoapod customers come back. It is also the reason the site needed to move off BigCommerce.
Custom functionality on a hosted ecommerce platform is always a compromise. BigCommerce gives you a product catalogue and a checkout. It does not give you a fully editable, per-product JavaScript experience with customer text entry, pattern selection and cart-level design review. Building that on BigCommerce means working around the platform’s limitations. Building it on WordPress and WooCommerce means building it properly.
The box builder we built is a bespoke JavaScript application integrated directly with WooCommerce. The customer experience is identical to what it was – the personalisation flow, the visual feedback, the text entry, the cart review. What changed is that every configurable element is now managed through the WordPress admin by the Cocoapod team. New flavours, new characters, new seasonal patterns – added by whoever is responsible for the products, not by a developer.
WooCommerce also gave us a better foundation for the rest of the site. A 250-product catalogue with 54 categories needs proper product and category architecture – not what BigCommerce defaulted to, but a structure planned for SEO, for mobile browsing and for long-term manageability. That is harder to do on a hosted platform where the URL structure and category hierarchy are partially determined by the platform itself.
The migration was done carefully. Every page with ranking equity was mapped. The new architecture was planned before a single product was migrated. The result is a site that performs better commercially, is stronger in search and is genuinely in the hands of the team running the business.
