Client Snapshot
Our client is an established, premium watch and watch-accessories retailer based in London, UK, trading on a custom-built WordPress and WooCommerce platform. Over the years, they’ve built a loyal community of collectors and enthusiasts, curating 4,000+ products across 150+ luxury and boutique brands, and regularly running campaigns and members-only events to keep that community engaged.
When they first came to Cyblance, the ask was simple on paper: give the website a design refresh. Four years later, we’re their de facto in-house web team the people they call for everything from a new feature idea to a 2am ‘is the site down’ text (it wasn’t, but we checked anyway).
The Challenge
A design revamp sounds straightforward, until you realize the site isn’t a simple WooCommerce store it’s a finely tuned, heavily customized ecosystem. Over the years, the client had commissioned a long list of bespoke plugins to handle unique business rules that off-the-shelf WooCommerce simply doesn’t support out of the box. That meant every single change we made however small had to be checked against a web of interdependent custom plugins before it could safely ship.
A tangle of dependencies — Any new feature or design change had to be cross-checked against every existing custom plugin to avoid breaking checkout, pricing, inventory sync, or account functionality.
Scope that kept growing — What started as a visual refresh naturally expanded as the client saw what was possible; more pages, more logic, more moving parts.
Zero tolerance for downtime — As a live, revenue-generating store with an active customer base, there was no ‘quiet period’ to experiment in; every release had to be safe, tested, and reversible.
A premium brand image to protect — The design language had to feel as refined as the watches themselves, without alienating a loyal, existing customer base used to the old site.
Why Cyblance
The client didn’t need a vendor who could follow a design brief — they needed a partner who could think in WordPress architecture, reverse-engineer years of custom plugin logic, and still ship confidently on a live store. That combination is exactly where Cyblance operates best.
- Deep WordPress and WooCommerce expertise, including comfort working inside heavily customized, non-standard plugin ecosystems rather than rebuilding from scratch.
- A process-driven approach to compatibility testing, so every release accounted for how existing plugins would behave with new code.
- Full-stack capability — design, front-end, back-end, and QA — under one roof, so the client had a single accountable team instead of juggling multiple vendors.
- A collaborative, long-term mindset — we treated the engagement as an evolving partnership, not a one-off project with a fixed end date.
That trust is precisely why a design revamp turned into a four-year (and counting) relationship where Cyblance now owns essentially everything web-related for the client.
What We Did
The engagement evolved in layers, each building on the trust earned in the last. Here’s the journey, chapter by chapter.
1. Website Design Revamp
We started where the client asked us to: a full front-end redesign. The brief was to modernize the storefront’s look and feel while keeping the shopping experience instantly familiar to existing customers a delicate balance for a premium brand where trust and heritage matter as much as aesthetics. We rebuilt the visual language across the storefront homepage, collections, product listings, and product detail pages with a cleaner, more editorial layout that let the watches themselves take center stage.
2. Full After-Login Experience
Impressed with the revamp, the client handed us the keys to the entire logged-in experience next. We designed and implemented every page a customer sees after signing in from the account dashboard to order history, saved items, profile management, and beyond bringing the same premium design language into the members’ area so the experience felt consistent from browsing to checkout to post-purchase.
3. Navigating a Complex Custom Plugin Ecosystem
This is where the real engineering discipline came in. Because the platform relied on multiple bespoke plugins built over the years for various business-specific functionalities, no task could be treated in isolation. For every feature we touched, we ran a compatibility pass against the existing plugin stack mapping dependencies, testing interactions, and staging changes carefully so new functionality never came at the cost of something that was already working. This groundwork made every subsequent feature we shipped faster and safer to build.
4. Deposit Payment Collection
Given the price point of luxury watches, many customers prefer to secure a piece with a deposit rather than paying the full amount upfront. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we took a ready-made deposit payments plugin and heavily customized it to fit the client’s exact business rules enabling both partial and full deposit payments at checkout, with the remaining balance tracked and collected later. The result was a genuinely bespoke commerce flow, built on a stable, well-supported foundation rather than a from-scratch plugin.
5. Multi-Currency Product Catalogue
With customers browsing and buying from across the globe, one price in one currency was never going to cut it. We enabled the admin team to list and manage every product in four different currencies, so pricing can be set and displayed accurately for different markets without manual conversion guesswork or a patchwork of workarounds.
6. Collection Module: Letting Customers Show Off Too
Watch collecting is as much a passion as it is a purchase, so we built a Collection module that lets registered users submit and showcase their own personal watch collections on the site. It’s a feature that turns the storefront into more of a community hub customers aren’t just buying watches, they’re proudly displaying them, which deepens engagement and keeps people coming back beyond the checkout flow.
7. Going Global: Multilingual Storefront (In Progress)
As the brand’s audience grew internationally, the client wanted the site available in Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and French, alongside the original English. With an already complex plugin environment to account for, we recommended Polylang paired with DeepL for translation a combination chosen specifically for its strong compatibility with the existing plugin stack and its ability to deliver high-quality, near-native translations without demanding a parallel content-management workflow for every language. This translation rollout is currently underway, with the site live in English today and the four additional languages progressively coming online.
8. Speed Optimisation
A premium storefront with 4,000+ products can get heavy fast, and speed directly affects conversion and search ranking. We ran a full performance pass across the site, including:
- Implementing page caching and object caching to reduce server response times.
- Compressing and converting images to modern, lightweight formats, with lazy-loading for below-the-fold content.
- Minifying and combining CSS/JS files, and deferring non-critical scripts to speed up initial page render.
- Auditing and cleaning up the plugin stack for redundant or resource-heavy processes.
- Optimizing and cleaning the WooCommerce database (transients, post revisions, expired sessions).
- Fine-tuning server-level configurations in partnership with the hosting environment.
The result was a noticeably faster storefront — quicker page loads across product listings and checkout, translating directly into a smoother shopping experience for a 3,000+ strong user base.
Results
Four years on, the transformation speaks for itself. What began as a design refresh grew into a full-scale digital partnership, with Cyblance now managing essentially every web-related need for the client.
- A modernized, on-brand storefront that reflects the premium nature of the products it sells.
- A fully custom, seamless after-login experience across the entire customer account journey.
- A customized deposit payment system tailored to the client’s exact rules for high-value purchases.
- A multi-currency catalogue, giving admins the flexibility to price products in four different currencies.
- A brand-new Collection module that turns customers into contributors, letting them showcase their own watch collections on-site.
- A multilingual storefront in active rollout, with Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and French progressively joining English.
- A significantly faster site, improving both user experience and search performance.
- A catalogue that has scaled to 4,000+ products across 150+ brands, supporting 3,000+ users and 800+ orders and counting, without the platform buckling under its own growth.
What’s Next
The relationship is very much active new campaigns, new feature requests, and new events keep coming, and Cyblance continues to be the team on the other end of the line. Top of the roadmap is completing the multilingual rollout across Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and French. Beyond that, plans include deeper personalization for logged-in users, continued performance tuning as the catalogue grows, and expanding on the new Collection module as more customers start showcasing their own watches.
Conclusion
What started as a design revamp became a masterclass in earning trust one release at a time. By respecting the complexity already built into the platform, and treating every feature big or small with the same care a watchmaker gives a movement, Cyblance became more than a vendor to this client. Four years, thousands of products, hundreds of orders, and an ever-growing feature set later, the partnership is still ticking and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Looking for a team that can take your existing platform seriously, quirks and all, and grow it with you? That’s exactly what we do best.
