Field notes on product data, e-commerce operations, and building websites that still make sense a year after launch.
A page builder does not make a site slow — it makes it easy to do four or five specific things that do, without warning you. The hero image trap, the three sources of layout shift, widget sprawl, and the caching settings that break templates.
Treat 400 product descriptions as a writing job and you get forty good pages and a lot of filler. Treat it as an editorial system — tiers, structural templates, guardrails, and a handover — and the whole catalogue reads as though somebody cared.
On a few thousand sessions a month most of the GA4 interface is noise wearing a percentage sign. The four numbers worth tracking, the two Search Console reports that beat any dashboard, and the one-page monthly note I actually send.
Syncs between an ERP and a store are rarely broken — they drift. Timing windows, tiered schedules for fast movers, a one-page map of who owns each field, and the threshold alert that stops a bad feed from emptying the catalogue.
Image work on a large catalogue is a pipeline problem, not a design one. The four numbers to fix before opening a single file, why filenames belong to the SKU scheme, and the checks that catch inconsistency before the category grid does.
On most stores the filter panel does the work the search box gets credit for — and it is a data problem, not a theme feature. Attribute coverage, controlled vocabularies, per-category filter sets, and the two failure states nobody designs.
Category structures do not break as a catalogue grows, they bloat — and the instinct to add more categories makes it worse. The rules I use for depth, size, naming, and planning a split before it becomes urgent.
The platform comparison is almost never settled by features. Four questions about the business — who maintains it, how odd the pricing is, where product data comes from, and what else the site must do — settle it every time.
On a replatforming project the redirect map is not a cleanup task at the end — it is the only artefact that carries the old site’s value across to the new one. Here is how I build one, and the verification pass most projects skip.
A SKU looks like a formality until the catalogue passes a few thousand items and nobody can tell which variants belong together. Here is the structure I use, the two identifiers people confuse, and the habits that quietly destroy a scheme.