Case Study: Migrating New Canaan Farms from WooCommerce to Shopify

The Challenge: A Legacy Brand Held Back by the Wrong Platform

New Canaan Farms has been crafting small-batch jams, jellies, salsas, and condiments since 1979. Acquired by the Waters family, sixth-generation Texans with deep roots in the Texas Hill Country, the brand has spent over four decades earning its reputation through exceptional product quality and a genuine commitment to craft. 

The brand wasn't the problem. The website was.

When New Canaan Farms came to us, they were running on WooCommerce, a platform that requires ongoing technical management that most product-based brands aren't built to sustain. Their site was slow, difficult to navigate, and not built to convert. Because of how limited their data infrastructure was on the old platform, they had very little visibility into what was actually happening with their online business. They had a product worthy of a serious e-commerce presence. They just didn't have one yet.

Why We Recommended Shopify

For a brand like New Canaan Farms, the case for moving to Shopify was clear. WooCommerce is a self-hosted platform, which means security, updates, speed optimization, and technical maintenance fall entirely on the business. For a brand focused on product and people, that's a real and ongoing burden that quietly taxes the business in time, cost, and performance. Their slow site wasn't a mystery. It was a predictable result of a platform that requires active technical stewardship to perform well.

Shopify handles all of that infrastructure behind the scenes. It's purpose-built for selling products online, with a checkout experience that consistently outperforms other platforms in conversion rate, and an app ecosystem that lets a brand connect every piece of their marketing in ways WooCommerce simply can't match at the same level of simplicity and reliability.

For New Canaan Farms, the migration wasn't just a website upgrade. It was putting the right foundation under a brand that had already done the hard work of building something worth buying.

What We Built

We rebuilt the New Canaan Farms website from the ground up on Shopify, designed to finally match the quality of the brand behind it. The old site made it hard to find products, hard to understand the full range of what the brand offered, and hard to complete a purchase with confidence. The new site solves all of that.

The product catalog, spanning sauces, mustards, salsas, jams, dip mixes, and gift collections, is organized intuitively so visitors can browse by category or find exactly what they're looking for without friction. The brand story, rooted in decades of handcrafted quality in the Texas Hill Country, comes through in the experience. And the site is built to convert, with strong product pages, mobile-optimized design, and a frictionless path to purchase.

We also set up email automations to ensure that the site's traffic didn't just visit and leave. New subscribers enter a welcome sequence, abandoned carts get recovered, and post-purchase touchpoints keep customers connected to the brand after they buy.

The Results: A Platform That Finally Performs

New Canaan Farms launched their new Shopify site in November 2025, right at the start of the holiday season. The timing wasn't incidental. A brand known for giftable artisan food products needed their e-commerce engine running at full capacity before their biggest sales window of the year.

It was. In November and December 2025, the site generated 10,406 sessions with an average conversion rate of 8.08%, more than double what most e-commerce brands consider a strong benchmark. That launch window drove a 122% increase in revenue compared to the same two months in 2024. For the full year, 2025 revenue was up 107% over 2024.

The traffic breakdown tells its own story. Of those November and December sessions, 75% came from direct traffic, meaning people who sought out the brand intentionally. That’s not a paid traffic spike. That’s a brand with real customer loyalty finally paired with a site worth sending people to.

The email automations we set up added a measurable revenue layer on top of the organic performance. In November and December alone, email open rates exceeded 40% and conversion rates ran between 11% and 15%. For context, industry average email open rates for food and beverage brands typically sit around 20%. New Canaan Farms was running more than double that out of the gate.

The momentum has carried into 2026. Through the first quarter, the site averaged a 3.74% conversion rate and a 185% revenue increase over the same period in 2024. Returning customers outpaced new customers nearly 60/40, a strong signal that the rebuilt experience is turning first-time buyers into repeat ones.

What This Means for Brands Still on WooCommerce

New Canaan Farms had everything going for them: a great product, a strong brand identity, beautiful packaging, and decades of customer loyalty. What they were missing was a website built to actually sell.

The right platform doesn't create a great brand. But the wrong one can quietly limit one for years. If your WooCommerce site is slow, hard to manage, or not converting the way it should, the problem isn't your product. It's the infrastructure underneath it.

Book a free consultation and let's look at what's possible when the platform finally matches the brand.