Case study · Head of IT · ongoing
Swiss made,
fixed & scaled.
Swiss Made Direct is the first live OriginMade country platform, selling authentic Swiss products worldwide. When I joined, the server was infected and the site was slow and full of SEO problems. Today it's secure, A-grade on performance and growing on organic traffic alone.
- Client
- Swiss Made Direct · Switzerland
- Role
- Head of IT: server, code, growth
- Timeline
- 2023 – present
- Platform
- WordPress + WooCommerce
Live site audit · 2026-09-29
Measured on the live site with Google Lighthouse (desktop) and a crawl of its sitemap and structured data.
Up from 2 a day, all from organic traffic. No ads.
Behind Cloudflare protection and edge caching.
Server infection removed, with hardening so it stays clean.
Mobile and desktop, with Core Web Vitals above 90.
The growth came from SEO, speed and email alone.
Server, Cloudflare, domain, email, SEO, code and analytics under one owner.
01 · The rescue
Infected, slow & invisible.
The store came to me with an infected server, a slow application and a long list of SEO issues holding back its rankings. I cleaned the infection, hardened the server and application, and fixed the technical SEO problems one by one.
Then I rebuilt performance from the ground up: object caching, Varnish, image and code optimisation, and Cloudflare protection with edge caching. The result is an A-grade performance score and PageSpeed above 95.
Migrations
Moved safely,
fixed properly.
GTranslate → WPML
The store's translations migrated safely from GTranslate to WPML, for proper multilingual pages.
Migration fixes
Every issue the language migration brought up found and fixed, so each language works properly.
10Web → Cloudways
The whole store moved from 10Web hosting to a Cloudways server.
Server upgrade
The Cloudways server upgraded for more headroom, speed and stability.
Domain & DNS
Domain and DNS managed through the move and ever since.
Cloudflare in front
The new server sits behind Cloudflare protection and edge caching.
02 · Custom development
Plugins & APIs,
built in-house.
Payment gateway APIs
Custom API integrations connecting the store to its payment gateways.
Shipping vendors
FedEx, Spring and other shipping platforms connected to checkout and fulfilment.
Custom Spring plugin
A plugin I wrote from scratch to integrate Spring shipping directly into WooCommerce.
Membership plugin
Custom membership functionality built specifically for the store.
Side cart
A custom slide-out cart that keeps shoppers on the page while they buy.
Product filters & more
Custom filtering and a long tail of smaller plugins and fixes built for this store.
Swiss Made iOS & Android apps
Custom apps built and shipped for the store, with gamified pop-ups, login and registration, cart, coupons, multi-language and multi-currency support, and a custom checkout with conditional logic.
03 · Search
Technical SEO,
ready for AI search.
Technical SEO
Crawl, indexing and on-page issues fixed across the application, the root cause of the old ranking problems.
Schema installation
Structured data added so products and the business show up properly in search results.
Sitemap upgrade
Sitemaps rebuilt and upgraded so search engines find and refresh every product and page.
LLMs.txt updates
An LLMs.txt kept up to date so AI assistants and LLM crawlers understand the store.
Rank Math setup
Rank Math configured for titles, metadata, redirects and ongoing SEO control.
Fixes & tweaks
A steady stream of smaller SEO and UX improvements behind the 10+ organic orders a day.
04 · Infrastructure & growth
Everything
under one roof.
I run the full stack: server management, Cloudflare, domain and DNS, and email authentication. On the growth side I set up email marketing, analytics and SEO tooling for the team.
- Server management
- Cloudways
- Cloudflare + edge
- WPML
- Domain & DNS
- SPF · DKIM · DMARC
- Moosend
- Mailchimp
- SMTP
- Matomo
- SE Ranking
- Ubersuggest
- Rank Math
- LLMs.txt
- iOS & Android apps
- Mailgun
- GTM & Pixel
- Merchant Center
- Daily backups
Part of something bigger
The first
OriginMade platform.
Swiss Made Direct is the live flagship of OriginMade, a network of country platforms connecting authentic local producers to global buyers. I built the umbrella site and the platforms coming next.
live →
