English Puzzle
English Puzzle: the teaching method was refined for years. The shop around it was not.
English Puzzle is Anna Kordalewska's own method of teaching English: classes in Warsaw, educational puzzles sold across Poland and through Polanglo bookshops, and daily editorial work (Word of the Day, idioms, study guides). All of it lived in a single WordPress site that had grown for years by bolting on one more thing. We rebuilt it starting from the most expensive part, the path to payment, and then stayed with the site permanently.
01 The challenge and our approach
× Before
- Three businesses inside one site. In-person courses (group, one to one, exam prep, kindergartens), physical product sales and an education blog shared one WordPress install, without shared logic or a shared look.
- The bottleneck sat in the cart and the checkout. The single most expensive moment on the site, the one where the customer pays, performed worst. It was the first thing the client reported and the first thing we took on.
- A theme built up in layers. Product page, category listing and offer pages looked like three different websites, because they had been built at different times with different tools.
- No safe place to make changes. Every fix meant touching the live shop, with no staging environment and no change history in a repository.
- Maintenance pushed to later. Overdue WordPress updates, spam coming through the contact form and slow loading, all treated as something to handle another day.
→ Our approach
- Revenue first, aesthetics second. Work was sequenced by impact on sales: cart and checkout before the product page, product page before offer pages, offer pages before the blog.
- No work on production. Before touching anything we set up a development environment and a repository. The client reviews a change before their customers see it.
- One theme instead of five layouts. We rebuilt the templates as a system, so that the shop, the product page, a course page and a blog post speak the same visual language.
- Performance treated as part of selling, not as trivia. In a shop where most traffic arrives from mobile and social, load time is part of the conversion rate.
- We do not disappear after launch. The redesign closed the first stage, after which the engagement moved into ongoing care: updates, incidents, and further work on pages and content.
02 Tech stack
What we built it with.
WordPress + WooCommerce
shop and content in one system the client's team can operate without us. Where the client publishes every day, that is an advantage, not a compromise.
Theme rebuilt on our side
shop, product, offer page and post templates as one coherent system instead of a pile of bolted-on views.
Development environment
a full copy of the site for testing and sign-off before release.
Git repository + deploy
change history, the ability to roll back, and an end to editing files on a live shop.
[payment gateway to confirm]
[to confirm: BLIK, Apple Pay, Google Pay, cards, online transfers]
[shipping integration to confirm]
[to confirm: courier, parcel lockers, labels]
03 What we did
Scope of work.
- Foundations
- Development environment and project repository. Local environments for the team and a defined deployment procedure.
- The path to payment
- Cart rebuilt: layout, readability of the order summary, behaviour on mobile. Checkout rebuilt together with its additional elements, released to production as a separate, closed stage. Clean-up of everything the customer sees just before paying, because that is where carts are lost most often.
- Shop and catalogue
- New product page: image, price, promotion and buy button arranged around the decision, not around the description. Rebuilt shop listing and category views.
- Offer pages and templates
- A simple page template and a dedicated page template, two tools instead of five variants. Courses and Pricing pages: five class formats (groups of 4 to 5, one to one, exam prep, conversation classes for mothers with children, kindergartens) presented in one layout with a clear route to contact.
- Content as part of the product
- A Word of the Day module on the home page: a daily reason to come back without opening the blog. Home page blocks and their proportions reorganised.
- Maintenance and performance
- WordPress and plugins updated to a safe version. Contact form spam blocked, on a form that carries course enquiries. Diagnosis and removal of a 500 error. PageSpeed optimisation, first on staging, then on production, continued as part of ongoing care. Day to day fixes after client feedback, handled through a single ticket channel.
04 Results
What changed.
The most expensive part of the site stopped being the weakest. Cart and checkout were rebuilt and released first, ahead of the rest of the redesign.
One site instead of three different looks. Shop, product page, course page and blog post now run on a shared template system.
Change stopped being a risk. Staging, a repository and a controlled deploy mean the client approves a change before it goes live, and every change can be reversed.
The course offer came back into the site. Courses and pricing stopped being a set of loose pages and became a readable route to signing up.
The engagement moved from project to care. After the redesign went live, English Puzzle stayed with us on ongoing support: updates, incidents and further development in one place, with no need to find a supplier each time something breaks.
[metric to add: PageSpeed score before and after]
Deliberately without percentages. We show what actually changed in the client's business and in their shop, rather than numbers we could not honestly attribute to a single change.
05 Related work
Sound familiar?
Your WooCommerce shop works, but it grew for years by bolting things on, and the cart and checkout are the last places anyone looked at. We start where the money is lost, and we stay with the shop after launch.