The CMS Migration That Paid for Itself
My wife Jessica and I run The Confetti Bar, a lifestyle brand about making beautiful messes (and lots of confetti). But after years of building the tech stack on WordPress, costs were going up while performance was going down. A migration to Squarespace + Shopify slashed costs, eliminated maintenance headaches, and let us actually focus on running the business.
CLIENT · THE CONFETTI BAR · ROLE · DESIGNER + DEVELOPER · TOOLS · SQUARESPACE, SHOPIFY
The site was costing us more than money
We'd been running The Confetti Bar on WordPress with WooCommerce for years — and things were working fine for a while. But in order to make content look and feel the way we wanted, we had to customize the site to the point where it was a maintenance nightmare: The site was slow. Plugins kept piling up for things that should've been simple. Every time Jessica wanted to write a blog post, the formatting fought her, or the page builder slowed everything to a crawl.
Hosting costs kept creeping up. Plugin renewals stacked on top of each other. Every fix created two new problems. Technical debt compounded quietly in the background, with band-aid solutions keeping things functional month-to-month.
The breaking point came when a content plugin wiped nearly two hours of Jessica's work on a single page — and our hosting provider revealed they had disabled database backups for "performance reasons." Performance that, notably, we still weren't getting. Increased bounce rates and abandoned sessions were proof of that: people weren't waiting around for slow pages to load. And the offered solution for future issues? Upgrade to a more expensive plan.
That was the last straw.
Two domains. One brand. Zero margin for SEO error.
The Split Platform Decision
We wanted full creative control over our content (Squarespace) and serious ecommerce power (Shopify). No single platform could do both well. So I went hybrid — main site at theconfettibar.com, store at shop.theconfettibar.com. Clean on paper, complicated in practice.
The SEO Threat
Two domains targeting similar keywords — especially "custom confetti," a #1 ranking we'd earned — was a real risk. A missing canonical tag, bad redirect, or confused domain hierarchy could silently wipe out years of organic build-up.
Hundreds of Redirects & Manual Rebuilds
Several hundred blog posts and product pages needed proper forwarding to new URLs. A significant portion of our custom product configurations in WooCommerce had no clean export path — they had to be rebuilt in Shopify by hand, option by option.
Solve the hard problems first. Build from there.
Lock Down the SEO
I applied canonical tags first — content authority on Squarespace, products on Shopify. Cross-linking between both sites created a cohesive experience and reinforced the domain relationship for search crawlers before a single page was moved.
Map Every URL
I did a full export of every page and product URL and mapped them to new destinations. Squarespace's built-in redirect tools handled the hundreds of blog posts; a WooCommerce export plugin made the Shopify product import workable for metadata and variants.
Rebuild Custom Products by Hand
I researched Shopify add-ons until I found one that could replicate our custom product configuration logic, then rebuilt each option as close to 1:1 as possible. Tedious, but critical for revenue continuity on our most unique offerings.
Collaborate on the Design
Jessica took the reins on Squarespace — she had a vision and the platform let her run with it. I shaped the Shopify store design to match the same aesthetic: clean, colorful, kinda classy. Navigation across both sites was built to feel like one connected brand experience.
Colorful. Clean. Kinda classy.
Click any image to expand
Numbers that speak for themselves
~65%
Reduction in annual platform costs — hosting, plugins, and subscriptions combined
90+
Squarespace Ahrefs performance score, consistently
98–99
Shopify Ahrefs performance score, regularly hitting near-perfect
#1
Google ranking for "custom confetti" — held before, during, and after the migration
~1 hr
Monthly maintenance time, down from several hours + compounding technical debt
↑ AOV
Average order value increased alongside smoother checkout completion
We're not thinking about the website anymore.
We're thinking about the business. Blog posts go up exactly how they should. New products launch in hours. Promotions and sales in Shopify take minutes to configure — no coding, no waiting on me to fix something.
Jessica and Alexis (our Head of Happiness) launched a podcast (they host it, I edit the final episodes) and that kind of creative expansion just wouldn't have had room to breathe before. We've also expanded into on-demand products — shirts, printed and framed art, apparel — using Shopify's third-party integrations to experiment without inventory risk. We even added text message marketing, which would've been another plugin nightmare on WordPress but was a quick Shopify add-on.
The brand has evolved too. What was primarily a confetti product company has grown into a full lifestyle brand celebrating the messy, joyful parts of life — and the platform flexibility made that expansion possible without overengineering anything.
There is a reason Cliff is not only my partner in life, but in business, too. He has that magic ability to take technical concepts and bring them down to earth in a way that I not only understand, but allows me to see and dream up new possibilities.
I fought him on the site migration for far too long (I mean really, who likes change?), but he was steadfast in his assessments and how it would lift all the technical, financial, and even emotional weight I didn't want to admit we were carrying.
Ever since we made the switch, I've had such a renewed sense of energy for molding The Confetti Bar into the brand that reflects my true heart…and I feel empowered to follow my creative instincts instead of feeling held back by our systems.
Sure, as his wife I'm a bit biased, but I wouldn't stay with this man for 19+ years if I didn't fully trust him with my life…and my business!
Jessica Huizenga — Co-owner, The Confetti Bar
If it takes days of coding to implement something that already exists as a built-in feature on Squarespace or Shopify, you're not maintaining a website — you're paying a technical debt tax. A full migration might cost less than what you've already lost.
Sound familiar?
If your platform is working against you, let's figure out what a move actually costs — and what staying is costing you.
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