Ooi Solutions · Case file
A New Zealand premium fabric retailer whose image-heavy e-commerce site couldn't keep up with demand. We spent five months rebuilding the experience - and tracked every improvement.
Baseline: Lighthouse mobile, /collections/all. Today: Chrome UX Report field data, 28-day window, 15 Jul 2026.
Source: The Fabric Store growth & performance report - GA4, Google Search Console and lead tracking, Jan 2025 → May 2025.
Admission notes
The Fabric Store sells premium fabrics, textiles and haberdashery online and across their New Zealand stores. Every fabric swatch, colour variant and collection is a search opportunity - but the site couldn't handle the visual weight of what they sell.
Scope
Documented in full in the The Fabric Store growth & performance report.
Before & after · the pages
These are the live The Fabric Store pages as they were, and as we rebuilt them. Screenshots come straight from the client performance report.
Thousands of fabric swatches crammed into an unoptimised grid.
Screenshots: The Fabric Store growth & performance report.
Core Web Vitals
Google's threshold for a good LCP is 2.5 seconds. The main collection page was over four times that.
Where those 11.2 seconds went
Source: PageSpeed Insights baseline audit.
Other notable metrics
Source: PageSpeed Insights, 15 Jul 2026 - real-user field data.
The 11.2s baseline is a Lighthouse lab test of the main collection page. The 1.4s is field data across the site. A like-for-like re-test of /collections/all would confirm the improvement end-to-end.
Third-party chat widget loading synchronously (~180ms), 14KiB unused CSS from the old theme, and a deferred size-guide modal that blocks the main thread on mobile.
The fix list
Not recommendations - the actual changes specified, page by page, in the SOP, with the collection page as the reference implementation.
| Issue found | What we changed |
|---|---|
| LCP at 11.2s on collection page | Preload the hero swatch image · convert to WebP with <picture> fallbacks · inline critical CSS for above-the-fold grid |
| Uncompressed fabric swatch images | Bulk WebP conversion at 80% quality · serve AVIF to supporting browsers via <picture> |
| No lazy-loading below the fold | Native loading="lazy" on all swatch images below row 2 · Intersection Observer for collection grids |
| Render-blocking CSS | Extract critical above-the-fold CSS with Critical · defer remainder |
| No product schema | Product, Offer and AggregateRating schema on every fabric listing |
| Missing alt text on swatches | Programmatic alt text: fabric name, colour, composition for 2,000+ images |
| Images without width/height | Explicit dimensions on all product images plus CSS aspect-ratio |
| Weak cache policy | Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable for optimised assets |
| No search or filtering | Faceted filter bar: fabric type, weight, colour, width and use case |
| Sample request buried deep | One-click sample request from product card · sticky CTA on collection pages |
The unglamorous part
Most of this engagement was invisible infrastructure work. It's also the reason the rest worked.
High-resolution photos uploaded directly from the camera with no compression, no WebP, no responsive sizing. The collection page loaded 40 of them at once.
Thousands of fabrics in a flat grid. Customers had to scroll through everything to find what they needed - cotton, linen, silk or synthetics.
Most fabrics had just a name and price. Composition, weight, width, care instructions and suggested uses were all missing.
The sample ordering flow was buried in account settings. Most customers didn't know samples were available.
Zero schema markup on any product page. Google had no product information to surface in search results or shopping surfaces.
The collection grid didn't reflow properly. Fabric swatches were cut off and product cards overlapped on screens under 400px wide.
Results
Every chart below is lifted from the client performance report, drawn from GA4, Google Search Console and lead tracking.
Jan 2025 → May 2025 · sample requests and online enquiries tracked across all channels
Monthly, Jan 2025 → May 2025
Jan-May 2024 vs 2025
Evidence
Search visibility and audience growth, straight from the consoles.
2.5× impressions · organic clicks up 76% · average CTR improved from 1.2% to 3.1% · average position up from 18 to 7
Google Analytics · monthly
New users vs returning visitors
Ooi Solutions
5 months, 13 interventions, +198% online enquiries - and every number on this page can be checked in GA4, Search Console or PageSpeed Insights. That's the point.
ooisolutions.in · hello@ooisolutions.in