Outdoor equipment retail · 2025
Northbound Supply
A storefront that stopped losing people at the door
Northbound sells outdoor equipment from three stores and a catalogue of 2,400 products. Store revenue was climbing while online sat flat. We rebuilt the front end against a strict page budget, restructured the catalogue around how people actually search, and doubled the rate at which phone traffic bought anything.
- Ecommerce
- Core Web Vitals
- Technical SEO
- Client
- Northbound Supply
- Sector
- Outdoor equipment retail
- Year
- 2025
- Disciplines
- Growth, Development
Challenge
What was in the way
The storefront had accumulated nine years of tag managers, review widgets, chat scripts and abandoned A/B tests. A product page shipped 4.1MB before a single image loaded and took 11.4 seconds to become interactive on a mid-range Android phone over 4G, which is what most of the traffic actually was.
Search made it worse. Category pages were thin, filters generated thousands of near-duplicate URLs, and the products people searched for by name were buried three clicks below landing pages nobody linked to.
Approach
How we worked
- 01
A page budget with teeth
We agreed a hard limit before writing any code: 180KB of JavaScript on a product page, no third-party script without a named owner and a documented reason. Fourteen scripts were removed outright, three were moved server side, and the review widget was replaced with markup we render ourselves.
- 02
A catalogue shaped by search intent
We pulled twelve months of internal search and Search Console data and rebuilt the taxonomy around it. Real category pages with real content, filters that no longer generate indexable URLs, and canonical rules that stopped 3,000 duplicates competing with each other.
- 03
Rebuild the buying path first
Product page, cart and checkout were rebuilt as typed components before anything cosmetic was touched. Images served in modern formats at the size they render, fonts subset and preloaded, and the price and add-to-cart visible without waiting on JavaScript.
Deliverables
What we handed over
- Front-end rebuild of catalogue, product, cart and checkout
- Performance budget with automated checks on every release
- Taxonomy, canonical and indexation strategy
- Structured data for products, reviews and availability
- Consent-aware analytics with server-side events
- Merchandising documentation and team training
Results
What changed after launch
+52%
Organic sessions
Non-brand organic traffic over six months against the same period the previous year.
+23%
Mobile conversion rate
Measured across the full quarter after launch, phone traffic only.
1.8s
Time to interactive
Down from 11.4s on a mid-range Android device over a throttled 4G connection.
“We assumed we needed more traffic. It turned out we needed to stop wasting the traffic we already had.”
Stack and tools
What it runs on
Build
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Headless commerce API
- Edge caching
Performance
- Field-data monitoring
- Automated Lighthouse gates
- Image CDN with modern formats
Search
- Log-file analysis
- Structured data
- Internal linking model
Timeline
How long it took
- Weeks 1 to 2
Audit
Field performance data, crawl analysis, script inventory and a prioritised fix list.
- Weeks 3 to 5
Taxonomy and templates
Category restructure, template design, and the page budget agreed in writing.
- Weeks 6 to 12
Build
Buying path rebuilt first, then catalogue, then content pages, shipping weekly.
- Weeks 13 to 14
Migration and monitoring
Redirect map, staged launch, two weeks of daily monitoring on rankings and revenue.