Appliance outlet: a closed online shop and 985 addresses going nowhere

An outlet with physical shops open in Madrid had its online shop at a standstill. It had been selling on PrestaShop until the spring; after a change of platform, the whole domain redirected to a password screen with a maintenance notice. Nothing could be bought. Hundreds of product pages were still indexed in Google and every one of them ended on that screen, so search visibility was draining away month by month. The good catalogue was in no backup: the only usable source was the database of an old PrestaShop installation.

What we built

• Catalogue rebuilt from the PrestaShop backup: 164 products with photo, technical sheet, price, EAN, brand and category. The database kept the texts in the second language and left the first one entirely empty; read carelessly, the backup looked useless.
• 985 old addresses redirected with a 301 to their product, their category or the catalogue, and not one to a broken destination. The redirects live in a single server map, not in 985 separate rules.
• The supplier's notice removed from the photos: 422 images had it burnt into the bottom edge, and they were cropped by detecting the strip of text, without cutting into the product.
• Search, filters and sorting in the catalogue, browsing by category and by brand, and technical sheets laid out as tables.
• Pages for the physical shops, delivery and payment, and a section of its own for cosmetically damaged stock, which is only sold in store.
• A unique description and alt text on every page and image, with an automatic check that verifies it on every publish, plus legal texts.