Questions and Answers
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about working with Alphamax Digital, across our eCommerce web design, SEO, Shopify migration, and website redesign services.
The Agency
About Alphamax Digital
Who we are, who we work with, and how we operate as an agency.
Alphamax Digital has offices in Luton and Covent Garden, London. We work with product brands across the UK, Europe, North America, and Africa. Most project communication happens remotely, so your location is rarely a barrier to working together. If you want to meet in person, our London office is accessible for clients travelling into the city.
We work primarily with product brands running eCommerce stores. This includes direct-to-consumer businesses, multi-brand retailers, and category specialists in areas such as health and wellness, sports and lifestyle, home goods, and fashion. Our clients typically have an existing store that is underperforming, or they are ready to build properly from scratch and want full ownership of their platform.
The process begins with a free strategy call. We use that session to understand your current situation, your goals, and where the biggest gaps are. From there, we put together a proposal that outlines exactly what we would do, in what order, and at what cost. There is no obligation at that stage and no vague commitments on our side.
Both. Some clients come to us for a specific deliverable such as a web build, a migration, or a technical audit. Many others stay on as ongoing partners for monthly SEO retainers, content strategy, and performance reporting. We are clear about what each engagement involves before any work starts, and we do not lock clients into arrangements that do not make sense for their stage of growth.
We are specialists. Our work is focused entirely on eCommerce: building stores, optimising them for organic search, migrating them off restrictive platforms, and redesigning them when performance has stalled. We do not run social media campaigns, manage paid advertising, or design branding from scratch. This focus means the people working on your project understand eCommerce deeply, not just in theory.
Service Questions
eCommerce Web Design
What to expect from a bespoke WooCommerce store build with Alphamax.
Most bespoke WooCommerce builds take between six and twelve weeks from discovery to launch. The timeline depends on the size of your product catalogue, the complexity of your checkout requirements, and how quickly content and assets are supplied. We give you a clear project timeline during the discovery phase so there are no surprises along the way.
We advise on appropriate hosting and help you get it set up, but the account is always in your name. We do not hold clients in hosting arrangements through us. This means you retain full control of your infrastructure and can make decisions about it independently at any point.
Yes. We build and configure WooCommerce so your team can handle day-to-day tasks without developer support. Adding products, updating copy, running promotions, and processing orders should all be straightforward once we walk you through the setup. We also provide documentation covering the tasks your team will handle most often.
WooCommerce runs on WordPress, which gives you complete ownership of your code, data, and hosting. There are no per-transaction fees, no platform restrictions on custom features, and no risk of a third party changing pricing terms or removing functionality your business depends on. For eCommerce brands focused on long-term growth, that level of ownership and control matters more than the short-term convenience of a hosted platform.
Not necessarily. We start with a technical and performance audit to understand why your current site is underperforming. In some cases, targeted fixes to page speed, structure, or checkout flow are enough. In others, a rebuild is the more cost-effective route. We tell you which one your situation calls for and explain the reasoning before you commit to anything.
Service Questions
eCommerce SEO
How we build organic visibility for online stores, including Google and AI search.
It depends on where you are starting from. Stores with significant technical issues often see meaningful improvements within the first 60 to 90 days as crawl errors and indexing problems are resolved. Building competitive keyword rankings typically takes three to six months. We track progress monthly through Google Search Console and Analytics so you can see exactly what is moving and why.
Both. Our eCommerce SEO engagements cover technical auditing, on-page optimisation for category and product pages, structured data implementation, semantic content strategy, and authority building through targeted outreach and link acquisition. These are not separate add-ons. They work together, and we plan them as a single programme built around your specific competitive situation.
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation. It refers to structuring your content so that AI tools and search engines can extract direct answers to buyer questions from your pages. As more shoppers use AI assistants to research purchases, stores that are structured for answer extraction get cited more often in AI-generated responses. We build this into every SEO engagement because it addresses where search is heading, not just where it is today.
Yes. We work with stores built on any platform, and we start every engagement with a full technical audit regardless of who built the site. If there are structural issues that will limit what SEO can achieve, we flag them clearly before agreeing a timeline or setting expectations. We would rather have that conversation upfront than promise results we cannot deliver.
Large catalogues introduce specific challenges: crawl budget waste, keyword cannibalism across similar product variants, and thin content at scale. We address these through proper faceted navigation management, strategic canonicalisation, and a content plan that targets category pages rather than trying to rank every individual product. We prioritise the pages where organic traffic translates into actual revenue.
Service Questions
Shopify Migration
Moving your store from Shopify to WooCommerce without losing data or rankings.
We migrate your full product catalogue including variants and images, customer records, historical order data, collections and categories, page content, and blog posts. We also carry across your URL structure where possible and implement 301 redirects for any URLs that must change, to protect your existing search rankings from day one of the new site going live.
A migration done without careful planning will damage rankings. Ours does not. We build a full URL map before the migration begins, implement 301 redirects for every changed URL, verify indexing after launch, and monitor Search Console for coverage errors in the weeks that follow. Protecting your organic visibility is a primary requirement of the project, not a secondary concern.
For most stores, the migration takes between four and eight weeks from the start of the project to go-live. Larger catalogues with complex product variants, custom Shopify apps, or multiple third-party integrations take longer. We scope the timeline accurately during the initial discovery session so you know what to expect before any work starts.
Most Shopify app functionality has a WooCommerce equivalent. We review your current app stack during discovery and map each function to an appropriate WooCommerce plugin or custom solution. Payment gateways including Stripe and PayPal integrate directly with WooCommerce and are set up as part of the build. Where a direct equivalent does not exist, we discuss your options before committing to a path.
No. We configure WooCommerce so your team can handle day-to-day tasks including adding products, updating content, processing orders, and running promotional campaigns without needing to touch any code. If technical changes are ever needed, we are available as an ongoing support resource. The goal is for you to run the business without being dependent on us for routine tasks.
Service Questions
Website Redesign
How we revamp underperforming sites without losing what is already working.
A revamp starts with your existing site and improves what is there: fixing performance issues, restructuring pages, tightening the customer journey, and strengthening the SEO foundation without discarding everything. A new build starts from scratch when the existing platform or structure cannot support the improvements needed. We tell you which one your situation calls for after reviewing your current site, not before.
We start with your Google Analytics and Search Console data to identify the highest-traffic and highest-intent pages. Pages that drive the most revenue or have the worst performance gaps relative to their potential get worked on first. This means the changes that matter most to your business happen early in the project, not at the end of a long queue.
We audit your content before making any decisions. Copy that is performing well in search and converting visitors is kept and refined where needed. Thin or duplicate content that is holding your site back is replaced. We document every change so you know exactly what was kept, rewritten, or removed and the reason behind each decision.
In most cases, yes. If your WordPress installation has a sound technical base, we can rebuild specific sections, improve page speed, restructure navigation, and optimise for search without scrapping the whole site. If we find deeper structural problems that make a rebuild more cost-effective in the long run, we will tell you that directly before you commit to any course of action.
We record baseline metrics before any work starts: Core Web Vitals scores, bounce rate, conversion rate, and organic traffic by page. After launch we track the same metrics month on month and share the data with you in a plain-language report. Improvement in those numbers is what we are accountable to. Our opinion that the site looks better does not count as a result.
Still Have Questions?
Book a free strategy call. We will answer anything not covered here and tell you honestly whether we are the right fit for your store.