A distinctive WooCommerce store built for performance
The Aroma Lab UK was never meant to look like a conventional WooCommerce shop.
The visual direction was bold from the start: oversized typography, rich colour, large product imagery, animation and video. Our challenge at BIAC Digital Studio was to keep that character while building a shop that is easy to browse, quick to use and reliable on every screen size.
The site is built with WordPress, WooCommerce and Elementor Pro. This combination gave us the freedom to create a distinctive front end, while keeping the shop underneath familiar and practical for customers and for the people who run it.
Designing the shop around the products
The catalogue is curated, not oversized. The structure of the shop needed to make that selection easy to understand.
Products are organised into clear categories, with straightforward names and practical information where customers need it. Delivery, returns, payment, safety and contact information are easy to find. They are not hidden behind the checkout.
The same thinking carried through to mobile. We spent a lot of time on details that are easy to miss when designing on a large screen:
- navigation
- product cards
- text sizes and button dimensions
- spacing and image proportions
- how much information is visible at once
The goal was not to simplify the personality out of the site. It was to make sure the design never gets in the way of finding a product and placing an order.
Making a media-rich homepage perform
The homepage uses large imagery, product photography, animation and video. Good performance was never going to come from removing everything visually demanding.
Instead, we focused on how those assets load and in what order. We optimised images, prioritised the content visible when the page first loads, reduced layout shift, tested caching behaviour and checked how different delivery and optimisation settings affected the live site.
One lesson stood out: an optimisation setting is not automatically an optimisation.
Some settings that looked useful on paper made no measurable difference. Others changed how responsive the site actually felt. So we tested every change against the real experience, instead of switching on every performance feature and assuming more optimisation means a faster site.
The results
The strongest results came on desktop. In a recent Lighthouse test of the homepage, The Aroma Lab UK scored:
- 99 Performance
- 100 Accessibility
- 100 Best Practices
- 100 SEO
- 3/3 Agentic Browsing checks
We are particularly pleased with this given how much visual content the homepage carries. This is not a stripped-back landing page built to chase a test score. It is a working WooCommerce store with substantial imagery, animation and video as part of its design.
Lighthouse results vary between tests and do not represent every visitor, device or connection. We use them as diagnostic evidence, not as the definition of a fast website.
Mobile performance has needed more work than desktop, and we continue to measure and refine it. The real goal is not a particular number. It is a shop that feels responsive when someone actually uses it.
Accessibility as part of the build
We treated accessibility as part of the interface, not something to check once the site was finished.
That meant working on heading structure, alternative text for images, readable typography, keyboard navigation, focus behaviour and the clarity of interactive elements.
The accessibility score reached 100 in the test above. Still, automated testing can only catch certain technical issues. It cannot prove that every barrier has been removed, so accessibility remains part of our work as content and functionality change.
A clear technical foundation
A well-designed shop also needs to make sense beyond what people see on screen.
The Aroma Lab UK has a clear category and page structure, descriptive product information, structured product data, internal linking and an XML sitemap. Practical questions about ordering, delivery, returns and storage are answered directly in the site content.
This structure is first of all for customers. It also gives search engines and newer AI-driven systems clearer information about the business, its products and how the site fits together.
The UK site is new, so we are not presenting early indexing as an SEO success story. Search performance has to be measured over a meaningful period. Our objective at launch was a technically sound foundation for that visibility to grow from.
A site that still feels like the brand
Performance work often pushes websites towards the generic: smaller images, fewer interactions, less movement, less personality.
We did not want that here.
The finished site keeps the large imagery, typography, colour and movement that define the brand. The work underneath makes those choices practical for a real online shop.
For us, that balance is the most interesting part of the project. A distinctive website should not have to choose between character and usability. Good development lets the two work together.
See how bold design and performance work together on the live site → thearomalab.uk
Lighthouse test of The Aroma Lab UK homepage: 99 Performance, 100 Accessibility, 100 Best Practices, 100 SEO and 3/3 Agentic Browsing.
