Ecommerce
Tree Enterprises
A 40-year manufacturer selling online to buyers who could not find them, rebuilt around what those buyers actually search for.
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The situation
Tree Enterprises has manufactured daycare furnishings in North Carolina for over 40 years. Cot sheets, cot covers, rest mats, bibs, changing table pads. The products are good and the prices beat the national distributors, but the online store was not pulling its weight. Google barely knew what it sold.
I built that store. It ran their business for years and it did the job it was hired to do, but it sat on a third-party theme with a page builder underneath, and the catalog had outgrown both. I know more now than I did then. So the first thing this project needed was for me to throw out my own work and start over.
The catalog told the story. Categories were named the way the shop floor talks: "Sleepy Time Mats," "Cot Cover," "Sheets and Blankets." Nobody searches for those. Their biggest competitor is a company many times their size that gets almost no organic traffic outside its own brand name. The entire long tail was sitting unclaimed.
What I did
Built a new theme from scratch on my Stratum base. No page builder, no parent theme, no Kadence, no jQuery. WooCommerce templates rewritten by hand, CSS split per template and conditionally loaded, fonts self-hosted as woff2 with preloads on the two faces above the fold, Splide as the only JS library and only on pages with a carousel. Gutenberg disabled, ACF Pro driving the homepage so the client can edit hero, categories, about, and reviews without touching a block.
Design came out of their logo: soft greens, baby blue, a swoop under the sticky header instead of a hard border, cartoon kids overlapping between sections. Playful without being cloying, and no yellow, which the client was tired of.
Then the SEO. I pulled nine months of Search Console data, 110,040 impressions across 2,263 clicks, and read it against the catalog. "Daycare" turned out to be the modifier that mattered on nearly every product line: "cot covers for daycare" converted at 5.4 percent against 0.29 percent for the generic term. Categories were renamed to match, slugs redirected, descriptive copy written for each one. The audit also surfaced a single query with 5,952 impressions and zero clicks, "what is a cot cover," which became the anchor of a new FAQ page with FAQPage schema wired into Yoast.
The migration itself was the hard part. A WP All Import run had duplicated 37 products on the live site and stripped categories and attributes off the originals. I rebuilt it over SSH instead: snapshotted the live database, moved posts, postmeta, and term relationships for all 37 products and their 553 variations by ID, resynced the product and attribute taxonomies, and transferred 173 WebP images with remapped attachment IDs.
Results
Launched July 2026 with the full catalog intact and category names that match real search demand instead of internal shorthand. The client edits the homepage through labeled ACF fields. The theme ships no framework CSS, no jQuery, and no page builder, so every page loads only what it uses.