WP, bookings & Woo for historic brewery.
Selling online helps this brewery expand into new markets
What did Hook Norton Brewery need?
Hook Norton Brewery is a historic, family-owned brewery with a national reputation and a business that spans brewing, a pub estate, an online shop, brewery tours, events, a kitchen and function spaces. The website needed to work harder across all of it.
The previous site had been doing its job since 2016. For a business of this complexity, that is a decent run. But the ecommerce setup was not converting as well as it should, the design had dated, and the site was not structured to handle the growing range of things Hook Norton needed it to do – sell beer and merchandise, sell tour tickets and event bookings, manage memberships and subscriptions, tell the brewery story, and serve a loyal but broad audience across all of it.
This was not a reinvention. The brand is strong and the existing audience trusts it. The brief was an evolution – better structure, better performance, better conversion, and a platform that could grow alongside the business without requiring a rebuild every few years.
What the site needed to do:
- Increase online shop sales for beer, merchandise and gifts without losing brand character or audience trust
- Handle a complex ecommerce mix – physical products alongside tickets, tours, memberships and subscriptions
- Serve multiple distinct business areas: shop, pubs, visits, events, careers and brewery story
- Improve performance, technical SEO foundations and accessibility across 90-100 pages
- Give the internal team control over a large and varied content set without developer dependency
Our approach
Project overview
An evolution of an established platform rather than a ground-up rebuild. Existing brand retained and respected. Bespoke WordPress and WooCommerce build with improved structure, conversion-focused ecommerce and custom post types for the brewery’s diverse content areas.
Design
- Design refreshed for consistency and usability while remaining true to brand packaging and heritage
- Template improvements improve clarity across a broad audience without losing the brewery’s character
- Responsive and performance-optimised across all modern devices from launch
- WCAG accessibility guidelines and responsive font scaling considered throughout the build
Content structure
- Approximately 90-100 pages across shop, beers, pubs, visits, events, careers and brand content
- Custom post types for pubs, beers and events – each with its own consistent template and URL structure
- Clear content hierarchies make large sections manageable as content grows over time
- Existing content and metadata carried across and implemented on the new site
WooCommerce
A complex ecommerce setup managed entirely within WooCommerce. Physical products – beer, merchandise, gifts – alongside virtual products including tour tickets, event bookings, memberships and subscriptions. Multiple payment methods supported. The existing shop transferred into the new theme with improved UX and conversion focus throughout.
SEO and performance
SEO supported by an in-house resource. Existing metadata retained and implemented across the new site. The rebuild improves technical performance and internal structure – the kind of foundations that compound over time on a site this size. Accessibility improvements applied throughout in line with WCAG guidelines.
A complex hospitality or product business?
If your site needs to sell products, manage bookings, tell a brand story and serve multiple audiences – all from one platform – we should talk.
Tell us what you are running and we will tell you how WordPress and WooCommerce can handle it.
The results
100
Google PageSpeed score on mobile and desktop at launch
Refreshed
Existing brand and audience trust fully preserved – an evolved platform, not a different site
Complex
Ecommerce handled in one platform – physical products, tickets, tours, memberships and subscriptions all through WooCommerce
90-100
Pages across shop, beers, pubs, visits, events, careers and brewery story – all structured and manageable
Improved
Conversion focus and UX improvements applied throughout the shop – the platform is now working harder commercially
Scalable
Flexible platform built to grow with the business – new products, events and content areas accommodated without restructuring
Technical details
WordPress theme
Built on our own bare-bones WordPress starter theme. No inherited styles, no third-party framework dependencies, no bloat. 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. That discipline holds even on a WooCommerce build of this complexity.
WooCommerce
Physical products, virtual products, tickets, memberships and subscriptions all handled through WooCommerce. Multiple payment methods configured and working at launch. WooCommerce was chosen because no other ecommerce solution integrates as cleanly with WordPress while offering this level of product type flexibility.
Custom post types
Dedicated post types for pubs, beers and events – each with its own template, URL structure and editorial workflow. As the estate grows, new pubs and beers are added in a consistent format without any structural work. The taxonomy system keeps related content connected automatically.
Accessibility and SEO
WCAG guidelines and responsive font scaling applied throughout – the site respects user device settings rather than overriding them. Existing metadata retained and implemented on the new site. Technical SEO improvements baked into the rebuild mean the in-house SEO resource is working from better foundations than before.
Why WordPress and WooCommerce were the right platform for Hook Norton Brewery.
Hook Norton needs one platform to do several commercially serious things at once. Most ecommerce solutions are built for one of them.
Selling beer online is straightforward. Selling a brewery tour ticket – with a specific date, a time slot, a limited capacity and an automated confirmation email – is different. Selling an annual membership with recurring billing is different again. Combining all three in the same checkout, on the same site, alongside a pub finder, an events calendar, a careers section and a brand storytelling hub, requires a platform that can hold all of that together without becoming a maintenance liability.
WooCommerce is the right answer here because it is part of WordPress rather than a separate system bolted on. The product catalogue, the editorial content, the pub listings, the event pages – they all live in the same CMS. The team manages everything from one place. There is no data syncing between systems, no separate logins, no risk of the shop and the content getting out of step with each other.
The complexity of the product mix – physical goods, virtual tickets, memberships, subscriptions – is exactly what WooCommerce was built to handle. Shopify or similar platforms would have required workarounds or third-party integrations for the virtual product types. WooCommerce accommodates them natively.
For a business with Hook Norton’s heritage, the continuity argument also matters. The brand and the customer base have been built over years. A rebuild that felt like a different site would have been a risk. An evolution on the same platform stack, with the same brand language, was the right call.
