Opening

When Halo & Chain launched, Square Online offered an easy way to begin selling handcrafted chainmail jewelry online. As the business expanded, however, the website began showing the limitations common to many growing ecommerce brands.

Rather than continuing to work around those limitations, Halo & Chain partnered with Flexify Labs to complete a Square to WordPress migration, creating a faster, more flexible ecommerce website built around long-term growth instead of platform constraints.

This case study explores why the migration was necessary, how the website was redesigned, and what the business gained by moving to WordPress and WooCommerce.

About Halo & Chain

Halo & Chain creates handcrafted chainmail jewelry inspired by fantasy, medieval craftsmanship, and modern festival fashion. Every piece is individually assembled by hand, with many customers requesting completely custom commissions.

As the catalog expanded and demand for custom work increased, the business needed an ecommerce website that could better showcase its craftsmanship while providing greater flexibility than Square could offer, without paying higher subscription fees.

Why a Square to WordPress Migration Made Sense

Square provided a solid starting point for the business, but it eventually became a limiting factor.

The existing website made it increasingly difficult to:

• Organize a growing catalog
• Create a premium shopping experience
• Improve search visibility
• Publish SEO content
• Track meaningful customer behavior
• Build custom functionality
• Expand the website over time

This wasn’t simply a visual redesign—it was a strategic Square to WordPress migration focused on giving Halo & Chain complete ownership of its online storefront.

Project Objectives

Every successful website starts with clear objectives.

Before beginning the redesign, we identified several priorities.

The new WordPress ecommerce website needed to:

• Better reflect the Halo & Chain brand
• Improve the customer journey
• Simplify product discovery
• Support custom commissions
• Increase website performance
• Strengthen technical SEO
• Reduce recurring platform costs
• Track customer behavior through Google Analytics
• Create a scalable foundation for future growth

Rather than rebuilding the previous website, the goal was to create a long-term business asset.

Why WordPress and WooCommerce?

Choosing WordPress wasn’t simply about switching platforms.

It was about choosing an ecosystem capable of growing alongside the business.

Compared to Square Online, WordPress and WooCommerce provide:

• Complete ownership
• Virtually unlimited customization
• Advanced SEO capabilities
• Flexible ecommerce functionality
• Lower recurring costs
• Thousands of integrations
• Better content management
• Long-term scalability

For businesses planning to grow, those advantages become increasingly important over time.

Reimagining the Shopping Experience

With the platform selected, attention shifted toward improving the customer experience.

Navigation was reorganized to make browsing collections more intuitive while creating clearer paths to featured products, best sellers, and custom commissions.

Every page was redesigned with the same goal:

Help customers discover products more naturally while reinforcing the quality of the Halo & Chain brand.

A Better Product Experience

Each product page was redesigned to better showcase handcrafted jewelry.

Improvements included:

• Larger product photography
• Cleaner layouts
• Better product organization
• Simplified purchasing
• Mobile-first optimization
• Related products
• Customer reviews

Instead of simply displaying products, the new pages help customers understand the craftsmanship behind every piece.

A Custom Order Workflow

One of Halo & Chain’s biggest differentiators is its custom jewelry.

The new website introduces a guided four-step commission process that allows customers to:

• Introduce themselves
• Select the type of piece
• Describe their vision
• Upload inspiration images

This structured workflow creates more complete inquiries while making the process significantly easier for both customers and the business.

Performance Improvements

Performance was another major priority during the Square to WordPress migration.

The new website was optimized through:

• Image optimization
• Modern caching
• Asset optimization
• Mobile performance improvements
• Faster page rendering

Across the website, Halo & Chain now averages:

• 70 Google PageSpeed (Mobile)
• 89 Google PageSpeed (Desktop)

These improvements create a noticeably faster browsing experience while supporting SEO and conversions.

Building a Strong SEO Foundation

Rather than treating SEO as an afterthought, technical optimization was incorporated throughout the project.

The new website includes:

• Optimized metadata
• Structured schema
• Clean URL architecture
• Proper heading hierarchy
• Internal linking
• Image optimization
• Search-friendly collections
• Blog functionality

These improvements helped the website achieve an average Lighthouse SEO score of 97, creating a much stronger foundation for long-term organic visibility.

Smarter Analytics

Understanding customer behavior is essential for continuous improvement.

More than twenty custom Google Analytics 4 events were implemented to track:

• Collection clicks
• Product views
• Shopping behavior
• Checkout progression
• Purchases
• Custom order submissions
• Primary CTA interactions

Rather than relying on assumptions, Halo & Chain can now make future decisions using real customer data.

Lower Annual Platform Costs

One of the most immediate benefits of migrating away from Square Online was reducing recurring operating costs.

The previous Square Plus subscription cost approximately $588 per year.

The new WordPress and WooCommerce website operates at roughly $75 per year, reducing annual platform costs by approximately 87% while providing significantly greater flexibility and complete ownership.

Lower operating costs allow Halo & Chain to reinvest more of its budget into inventory, marketing, and future business growth.

Results

The completed Square to WordPress migration for Halo & Chain delivered meaningful improvements across nearly every aspect of the business.

Halo & Chain now benefits from:

• A custom WooCommerce website
• Complete ownership of its platform
• Approximately 87% lower annual platform costs
• Faster page performance
• Stronger technical SEO
• Advanced Google Analytics tracking
• A guided custom order workflow
• Better product discovery
• Improved mobile usability
• A scalable foundation for future growth

Final Thoughts

A website should become more valuable as a business grows—not more limiting.

For Halo & Chain, migrating from Square Online to WordPress wasn’t simply about changing platforms. It was about building an ecommerce website capable of supporting the next stage of the business.

Today, Halo & Chain has complete ownership of its online storefront, lower recurring costs, stronger SEO, improved analytics, and a flexible WooCommerce platform designed to grow alongside the brand.