Room to Grow

Once upon a time – around 2012 – we were asked to develop a website for a small children’s bed retailer based in Ilkley, West Yorkshire. Since then, Room to Grow has gone from strength to strength and are now known and respected as one of the leading online children’s beds retailers in the United Kingdom.

Identifying Improvements

The 2012 site was built on an ecommerce platform called Lemonstand. Although still fully-functional, development of the project was abandoned in favour of Lemonstand 2.0, a SaaS product offered by most of the original team. Due to the bespoke functionality we’ve helped develop over the years, a hosted ecommerce solution wasn’t going to cut it for Room to Grow.

Although there’s plenty of ecommerce platforms available, the first thought for any serious online business is Magento. Magento has been around for years and built up a reputation as the enterprise solution for serious ecommerce websites.

Having worked with Magento previously, Room to Grow wasn’t impressed with the learning curve and limitations of the platform. Lemonstand had always been easy to use for senior staff and new starters and Room to Grow wanted whatever replaced it to be just as easy to use.

Genius Division suggested a combination of WordPress and WooCommerce as we know it’s up to the task, can be integrated with a wide variety of third-party systems easily and most importantly we have the in-house skills to develop bespoke plugins and functionality where necessary to accomplish anything Room to Grow would need on their new site.

Our Work

One of the biggest problems clients face when moving between platforms is transferring their product catalogue. We worked closely with Room to Grow to create scripts which could export their current products and automatically import – drastically reducing the amount of time spent inputting data and testing the new site.

Moving the site from its old server to our WordPress tailored hosting has let us performance tune the site and achieve respectable scores in Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GT Metrix which help with search engine rankings – something we’re always looking to improve as part of our ongoing involvement with Room to Grow.

Creating a positive impact

The new website is the fastest Room to Grow website yet and—with the brand new design—provides a fresher, mobile-friendly experience for Room to Grow customers.

• Taken the Room to Grow website from £300,000 to £1.2 million turnover per year
• Maintaining a high performance website: we maintain a performance Google PageSpeed score of 60-70: higher than Amazon.co.uk (41), Ebay.co.uk (37), Argos.co.uk (22) and Asos.com (14)
• 130,000 users since launch of new website in first 3 months
• 610,000 page views with avg. session of 2 minutes since launch of new website in first 3 months

How we can help your business

If you have a website that’s been established for a number of years it can be highly beneficial to review how its working and how you use the website as a business asset. Consider what you’d like your website to deliver and how efficient it is for your staff and your customers.

Here at Genius Division we can help you identify areas of improvement that will add value to your business in terms of your online presence. If you’d like to discuss your ideas with us, or you’d like us to review your website and explain how we can improve it, please get in touch.