01
Catalogue Migration
Every product rebuilt in WooCommerce with a stable SKU scheme, so re-imports update records instead of duplicating them.
Case Study · E-Commerce & Web Development
Rebuilding a 678-Product Fitness Catalogue as a Quote-Driven Sales Tool
Beyond the Basics Fitness had two decades of commercial equipment expertise sitting behind a CMS that was glitchy enough that nobody wanted to touch it. We rebuilt the whole catalogue as a searchable, filterable system their team actually runs.
- Client
- Beyond the Basics Fitness
- Location
- Calgary, Alberta
- Timeline
- February - April 2026
- Focus
- Migration · WooCommerce · Search · Lead Capture
678
Products rebuilt into a catalogue their team can manage
1,447
Legacy URLs mapped so search rankings survived the move
1,779
Product images migrated and re-attached to the right SKUs
<100ms
Typical time to first byte on cached pages
The Business
Two decades of commercial fitness expertise in Western Canada
Beyond the Basics Fitness has outfitted gyms, hotels, corporate facilities, condo buildings and training studios across Alberta since 2004. They do layout and design consultation, commercial equipment sales, installation, and ongoing service and maintenance.
It is a considered, consultative sale. A client is not adding a leg press to a cart. They are planning a facility, balancing budget against floor space, and asking which machines suit their members. The website has to support that conversation rather than try to replace it.
The Problem
A catalogue nobody wanted to touch
The previous site had a content management system, but it was glitchy and awkward enough that using it became a job people avoided. Adding a machine or correcting a spec was slow and unreliable, so in practice the catalogue drifted out of date.
On the visitor side, there was no way to search or filter hundreds of machines, and nothing connecting a browsing session to a sales conversation.
"The expertise was all there. The tooling just made it painful to keep current."
What we inherited
EditingA CMS too glitchy to rely on
CatalogueHundreds of products drifting out of date
SearchNo filtering, no faceting, no search
Lead captureOne generic form, no product context
CategoriesInconsistent and partly missing
HostingBuckling under crawler traffic
Same expertise, rebuilt so people can actually navigate it
A catalogue, a search engine and a lead path, on infrastructure that holds up
02
Taxonomy Rebuild
42 categories and 181 tags applied across the range, including AI-assisted tagging to fill gaps the original data never had.
03
Catalogue Mode
Cart, checkout and pricing removed. Product pages end in a consultation request, because configuration and volume decide the price.
04
Collaborative Wishlists
Private, unguessable links that let a facility manager, their GM and their trainer build one equipment list together from different devices.
05
Search That Forgives
Typo-tolerant search across product names, specs and model numbers, so a half-remembered machine name still finds the right page.
06
Migration Without Loss
1,447 legacy URLs mapped to their new destinations, plus 49 articles carried across with their images intact.
Rebuilding the catalogue as clean, structured data
Rather than carry the old system's quirks forward, we rebuilt the data from the published site, reading it page by page, then reassembling it as a catalogue with real relationships between products, images, brands and categories.
1
Extract
Read the full published catalogue, pulling names, descriptions, specifications, imagery and breadcrumb categories back out into structured records.
2
Deduplicate
Collapsed pages that described the same machine and assigned every product a stable SKU so future imports update rather than duplicate.
3
Enrich
Filled the gaps the old site never had: categories for products that had none, plus 181 descriptive tags generated and reviewed across the range.
4
Preserve
Mapped 1,447 old URLs to their new homes so existing rankings and inbound links kept working on launch day.
Built for someone planning a facility, not filling a cart
The rebuilt site opens on a hero that alternates between photography and video of real installations, then sends visitors into a catalogue organised the way their buyers actually think: by zone, by category, by brand.
Every product page carries structured specifications and ends in a conversation, not a checkout. The whole experience is designed to get a qualified enquiry into the sales team's inbox with the equipment context already attached.
Website rebuild, migration and development by Uncommon Marketing Agency.
Catalogue First
All 678 products are browsable, filterable and searchable. The range is the site's main asset, so it leads.
Consultative by Design
No prices, no cart. Product pages route to a consultation request that carries the equipment details with it.
Editable by the Team
Their marketing manager adds products, builds categories and publishes articles without needing a developer.
Catalogue Mode
An e-commerce engine with the commerce taken out
WooCommerce gave us the catalogue structure Beyond the Basics needed: variations, attributes, categories, search, filtering. What it also gave us was a shopping cart nobody wanted.
Commercial equipment pricing depends on configuration, volume, installation and service terms. A public price would be wrong for almost every buyer. So we stripped the storefront back to no cart, no checkout and no prices, then replaced every “add to cart” with a route into a real conversation.
52Manufacturer brands represented across the catalogue
Collaborative Wishlists
Equipment decisions are made by teams, so we built for teams
Nobody outfits a facility alone. A hotel GM, their operations lead and a fitness consultant all have opinions, and they are rarely at the same desk.
We built a shared wishlist system on top of the catalogue. Anyone can create a named list, get a private link with an unguessable token, and send it on. Everyone who opens that link adds to the same list from their own browser, and the list persists. Bot protection keeps it clean, and the pages stay out of search results.
When the list is ready, one click hands the whole thing to the sales team with every product attached, so the first conversation starts with the equipment already on the table.
Then we made it survive the internet
Shortly after launch the site started timing out. It was not traffic. It was aggressive commercial crawlers hammering every one of the 678 product pages at once and starving the server of PHP workers.
We blocked the offending crawlers at the web server, widened the worker pool, and put full-page caching in front of the whole catalogue. Cached pages now typically return in well under 100 milliseconds, and the protection was rolled out across every site on that server rather than just this one.
The Result
A catalogue that works as a sales tool, and a team that can run it
Beyond the Basics Fitness moved from tooling nobody wanted to use to a managed catalogue their marketing manager updates herself, on infrastructure that holds up under load.
- 678 products live, searchable and filterable
- 1,779 product images migrated and matched to the right records
- 52 manufacturer brands and 42 categories organised across the range
- 1,447 legacy URLs redirected so nothing was lost in the move
- 49 articles migrated with imagery intact
- Consultation requests arrive with product context attached
- Shared wishlists let buying groups build one list together
- Cached pages serve in under 100ms, with crawler protection in place
- The client's team publishes products and categories without a developer
Built to be handed over
A rebuild is only worth it if the client can keep it moving. Their team has role-based access, a trimmed-down admin that hides everything they do not need, and the ability to create categories, publish products and run the blog on their own.
Additions to the homepage since launch have been driven by their marketing manager, built around a category she created herself, which is exactly the point.
A website should make expertise easier to reach, not harder.
Beyond the Basics Fitness never had a knowledge problem. They had a delivery problem. Once the catalogue became something people could search, filter, share and enquire about, two decades of experience finally had somewhere to land.
Is your product range stuck in a website nobody can edit?
We migrate, rebuild and modernise catalogue sites, then hand them back to teams who can actually run them.