GRH Kratom moved six years of rankings to Shopify without losing one.

01The challenge

GRH Kratom & Botanicals grow kratom and kava on a family-owned farm in Southeast Asia and ship it direct to customers in the United States. Six years of writing about strain, origin and testing had done its work. Hundreds of products and thousands of pages ranked. Most orders began with a search rather than an advert.

WooCommerce had become the limit rather than the platform. The catalogue was too large for it, pages were slow, and state-level shipping rules were handled by hand. Growth meant adding products, and adding products made the store slower. The business had outgrown the thing it was built on, and everyone involved knew it.

The obvious move was to rebuild and accept a ranking dip. That is what every quote they had received described, and it was offered as normal. For a store that lives on organic search, a dip is not a temporary cost. It is the year. That constraint set the brief before a single design decision was made.

02Our approach

03Design & UX

Hierarchy on the product page follows the order the questions arrive in. Where the leaf was grown comes first, then the batch and the date it was tested, then what the certificate says. Strain, vein and harvest sit alongside. Price waits below all of it. Promotional badges and urgency counters were left out, because they undercut the argument the page is making.

On a phone the catalogue is where this audience spends its time, so filtering had to work with a thumb. Strain and vein filter first, format second. The shipping restriction shows in the product summary rather than behind a tap, so nobody scrolls a long page to learn they cannot order. Lab certificates open in place.

04Development & technical implementation

The store was rebuilt on Shopify and the catalogue moved with Matrixify, products, variants and content together. The redirect map was the larger piece of work. Every ranking URL was inventoried and matched, including orphaned pages nobody had linked to for years that still brought in visitors. The 301 map was tested against the live index before launch.

State-level shipping rules were built into the store rather than added as an app. The restriction renders on the product page from the same source that blocks the cart, so the two cannot drift apart. Search Console and GA4 were watched daily through launch week, which is how the client could see that positions had held.

The lab certificates existed as loose PDF files that nobody could match to a batch. We rebuilt them as structured product data, so a customer holding a jar can reach the certificate for that batch. The matching was manual and slow, and the client did most of it themselves. That work set the pace, and the store went live in 8 weeks.