Gillian Julius Case Study: A Smooth Migration from WordPress to Shopify
WordPress to Shopify Migration, Custom Theme Development, and a Full E-Commerce Stack Built for a Celebrity-Followed Fashion Brand
A jewellery brand trusted by celebrities and luxury retailers shouldn’t be held back by plugin issues, downtime, and constant website maintenance.
This case study explores how ControlF5 migrated Gillian Julius from WordPress to Shopify, transforming an aging website into a fast, secure, and scalable ecommerce experience built for modern growth.
The Brief
Based out of Los Angeles, California, Gillian Julius is a contemporary jewellery brand with a reach that goes well beyond its West Coast roots. With pieces featured in high-end speciality boutiques and luxury retailers worldwide, and a growing celebrity following, the brand sits confidently at the intersection of fashion-forward design and everyday wearability.
The brand had been running on WordPress for nearly 10 years, but recurring plugin updates, website downtime during traffic spikes, security concerns, and ongoing maintenance had become major challenges. Website hacking and performance issues were creating unnecessary risks and limiting growth.
ControlF5 was brought in to make it right, a full migration to Shopify, a ground-up rebuild of the store experience, and a carefully chosen app stack to drive revenue from day one.
Thinking about launching your own jewellery brand? Our guide on How to Start a Jewelry Business Online with Shopify walks you through everything from choosing products and setting up your store to marketing and scaling your business online.
- Industry
- Project
- Technology
- Website
Challenges
Moving a jewellery brand from WordPress to Shopify is a decision that doesn’t happen overnight. It happens when the pain of staying on the old platform outweighs the effort of rebuilding.
For Gillian Julius, that point had well and truly arrived. Here is what the WordPress setup was doing, and failing to do, before we stepped in.
Every issue we found was costing the brand real customers, real revenue, and real credibility.
1. Plugin Overload and Never-Ending Maintenance
The WooCommerce setup had grown into a patchwork of plugins, inventory managers, payment gateways, SEO tools, and product filters, each one a potential conflict waiting to happen.
Every WordPress or WooCommerce update risked breaking something on the storefront. The team was constantly firefighting instead of focusing on the brand.
2. Painfully Slow Page Speed
For a jewellery brand, product photography is everything. But those high-resolution images were being served unoptimised, loading in over 7 seconds on mobile.
Add render-blocking scripts, no caching, and a heavy theme, and the result was a Shopify store that drove customers away before they even saw a single piece.
3. A Checkout Experience That Lost Sales
The WooCommerce checkout was multi-step, outdated, and poorly configured for mobile shoppers.
Guest checkout wasn’t streamlined, payment options were limited, and the process felt far from the premium experience a jewellery buyer expects. Cart abandonment was high, and conversions were suffering for it.
4. Mobile Experience That Fell Flat
A large portion of Gillian Julius’s traffic was coming through mobile, but the website was not built for it. Product images were displaying incorrectly, navigation was cramped and unresponsive, and CTAs were too small to interact with comfortably.
For a brand whose customers browse and shop on their phones, this was a critical failure.
5. Inventory Management Was Manual and Error-Prone
Keeping product listings, variants, and stock levels accurate across WooCommerce required juggling multiple plugins that frequently fell out of sync.
The result was stock discrepancies, incorrect availability shown to customers, and a backend that consumed far too much of the team’s time.
6. The Store Didn’t Look Like a Jewellery Brand
A contemporary jewellery brand lives and dies by its visual presentation. The WordPress website looked generic, with inconsistent layouts, product photography that wasn’t given room to breathe, and a design that communicated nothing about the brand’s identity or positioning.
It looked like a template, not a brand.
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Solutions
WordPress to Shopify Migration
We architected and executed a full platform migration from WordPress/WooCommerce to Shopify, transferring all products, collections, variants, customer data, and order history with zero loss. Every existing URL was mapped and 301 redirected to its Shopify equivalent, preserving the website’s SEO equity through the transition.
The entire migration was built and tested in a staging environment before going live, ensuring no downtime and no disruption to the Shopify store.
Custom Shopify Storefront with Horizon Theme
We built the store on Shopify’s Horizon theme, customised from the ground up for a contemporary jewellery aesthetic. Full-width product imagery, refined editorial layouts, clean typography, and a visual hierarchy designed to let each piece command attention.
The UI was stripped back intentionally because when your product is the hero, the design should frame it, not compete with it.
Before choosing a theme for your jewellery store, see our expert picks in the Best Free Shopify Themes for Jewellery Brands guide.
Mobile-First UX Rebuild
Every page was redesigned with mobile as the primary canvas. Touch-optimised navigation, swipe-enabled product galleries, correctly scaled imagery, and a persistent sticky Add-to-Cart bar across product pages.
The mobile experience went from frustrating to fluid, matching the expectations of a customer browsing luxury jewellery on their phone.
Revenue-Focused Shopify App Stack
We deployed a curated set of Shopify apps chosen specifically to increase revenue and improve the customer journey:
- Product Bundles App: enabling jewellery sets and curated combinations to lift average order value
- Upsell and Cross-Sell: surfacing complementary pieces on product and cart pages at the right moment
- Product Reviews App: embedding authentic social proof directly onto product pages to build purchase confidence
- Wishlist App: letting customers save pieces they love and return with intent to buy
- Email Reminders / Abandoned Cart Recovery: automated sequences that bring back shoppers who left without purchasing
- SEO App: handling meta optimisation, structured data markup, and sitemap generation at the platform level
Google Analytics 4 — Full E-Commerce Tracking
GA4 was configured with complete e-commerce event tracking, product impressions, add-to-cart actions, checkout funnel steps, and purchase completions.
For the first time, the Gillian Julius team had clear, actionable data on exactly how customers were behaving through every stage of the buying journey.
Checkout Optimisation
Shopify’s one-page checkout was configured with multiple payment methods, a frictionless guest checkout flow, trust signals, secure payment badges, and return policy highlights positioned at the key decision points. The result was a checkout experience that felt as premium as the jewellery itself.
Page Speed and Performance
On Shopify’s infrastructure, with WebP image conversion, lazy loading, a lean theme build, and minimal third-party script overhead, the store’s load time dropped from over 7 seconds to under 2.
Fast enough that customers stay. Fast enough that Google notices.
Results
The numbers after migration told a clear story: a jewellery store that now loads fast, converts better, and operates without the constant technical burden of a WordPress backend held together with plugins.
| Metric | WordPress (Before) | Shopify (After) |
| Mobile Page Load Time | 7.4 seconds | 1.9 seconds |
| Google PageSpeed Score (Web) | 26 | 100 |
| Checkout Completion Rate | ~1.1% | ~3.6% |
| Cart Abandonment Rate | ~79% | ~52% |
| Average Order Value | Baseline | +38% (bundles + upsell) |
| Mobile UX Score (Lighthouse) | 38 | 84 |
| Plugin / Maintenance Issues | Weekly conflicts | Zero — fully managed by Shopify |
| Inventory Accuracy | Manual, frequent errors | Real-time, fully automated |
More Shopify Success Stories
1. Revamping The Alpine Apothecary: WooCommerce to Shopify Migration
Migrated a wellness brand from a bloated WooCommerce setup to a fast, clean Shopify store, better speed, smoother checkout, and zero plugin headaches.
2. WooCommerce to Shopify Migration for Improved Performance and Sales (Furst Gear)
Moved an outdoor gear brand to Shopify, fixing performance issues, rebuilding the checkout, and deploying an app stack that drove sales from launch.
Explore More Shopify Success Stories → See how ControlF5 helps brands migrate, build, and scale on Shopify for long-term growth.
“Jewellery brands are a particular kind of challenge — the product is small, the price point is high, and the customer needs to feel trust and desire at every step of the journey. With Gillian Julius, our focus was on making sure the Shopify store communicated quality from the moment the page loaded. The Horizon theme gave us a strong canvas, but the real work was in the details — how product images were framed, how the checkout felt, how the app stack worked together without cluttering the experience. Getting all of that right on a brand with international visibility meant there was no room for shortcuts. I am genuinely proud of how the store came together.”
Bharti Nigam, Project Manager, ControlF5
Client’s Experience With Us
Client’s Experience With Us
With Controlf5’s help, the client now has a fully functioning and optimized website. The team listens attentively, enabling them to deliver solutions that align with the client’s requirements. Their flexibility, patience, and collaborative approach have been key to establishing a smooth workflow.
Conclusion
Gillian Julius had the brand, the product, and the audience. What they needed was a website that could keep up. Through a seamless WordPress to Shopify migration, we moved them away from a maintenance-heavy platform and delivered a fast, visually compelling Shopify store designed for growth, conversions, and long-term scalability.
The new store now loads in under 2 seconds, converts at more than three times the previous rate, and operates without the technical overhead that was consuming valuable time and resources. From Shopify migration and custom theme development to UX optimization, performance improvements, and revenue-focused integrations, every aspect of the store was built to support business growth.
If your fashion, jewellery, or lifestyle brand is considering a WordPress migration to Shopify or looking to improve the performance of an existing Shopify store, ControlF5 can help you create a faster, more scalable eCommerce experience.
Book a Free Consultation, let’s talk about what your store is really capable of.