Concept project · Shopify · Home fragrance

Low Mesa

From 40 menu links to 5, the best seller one tap from the first screen, and a home page 29× lighter.

Brand

Low Mesa

Where

Austin, Texas

Sells

Small-batch candles & diffusers

Platform

Shopify

Packages

Store Redesign · AI Support Agent

Low Mesa redesigned home page on desktopLow Mesa redesigned product page on mobile
The redesigned store: desktop home and mobile product page.
The challenge

A good product,
buried under its own store.

Low Mesa makes hand-poured candles named after the Texas high desert. The store had grown on an aging theme, and it showed.

What we found before the redesign:

01A 40-link mega menu.Every collection, scent and gift idea at the same level, so nothing stands out.
02Oversized photos.Slides and product photos exported at 2,400 px (428–786 KB each) and sent at that size to every screen, with no srcset, width or height.
03Render-blocking extras.jQuery, a carousel library, an icon font and three Google Fonts from 4 CDNs, plus the theme’s own vendor bundle, all load before anything paints. Then app scripts block the phone’s main thread for 3.5 s.
04Little for search engines or shoppers to trust.No product structured data, no reviews, and shipping details only in the footer.
05Hard to use on a phone.Small tap targets, low-contrast grey text and 8 images without alt text on the home page.
What we did

Five changes, one direction:
get to the candle faster.

01

Navigation & categories

We collapsed 40 menu links into 5 clear doors: Candles, Diffusers, Gift sets, Scent guide and Our story. Scent families moved out of the menu and into a browsable index on the home page.

Before: mobile menu
Before: mobile menu
After: mobile menu
After: mobile menu
02

Homepage

The slideshow became one still image and one sentence about what the brand smells like. The first screen on a phone now carries a direct link to the best seller, with its price.

Below it: four best sellers, a scent index, the brand story and the shipping promise, each saying one thing.

03

Product page

Price, size and burn time sit together. Shipping time, free-shipping threshold and returns sit directly under the button, where the question comes up.

Scent notes are read in three words each, and a reviews block answers the questions the description can’t.

04

Technical SEO & speed

  • Product, Offer, shipping, return policy, Breadcrumb and Organization JSON-LD
  • AVIF and WebP in several sizes, width and height on every image, lazy-loading below the fold
  • One self-hosted display font (two files of about 20 KB) plus system fonts; no third-party requests
  • Meta descriptions, descriptive alt text, 44 px tap targets, visible focus states
05

AI support agent

A chat assistant answers from the store’s own shipping, returns and product notes, cites the policy it used, and hands off to a person in one tap.

In the example, a shopper asks when a candle would arrive in Dallas and gets a date, not a link to the FAQ.

After: assistant on the product page
After: assistant on the product page
Before & after

Same products, same photos.
Different store.

BeforeBefore
AfterAfter

Drag to compare.

Measured

The numbers,
before and after.

MetricBeforeAfter
Performance scorehome page35100
Performance scoreproduct page37100
Largest Contentful Painthome page10.8 s1.5 s
Largest Contentful Paintproduct page8.5 s1.8 s
Total page weighthome page5.5 MB0.19 MB
Total page weightproduct page3.6 MB0.22 MB
Accessibility scorehome · product89 · 87100 · 100
SEO scorehome · product91 · 91100 · 100
Primary menu links405
Taps to a productfrom the first mobile screen21
Product structured dataJSON-LD on product pageNoYes

Lighthouse 12.8, mobile preset, 3 runs per page, median run shown. Low Mesa is a concept brand. The “before” store is our build of a typical store in the segment, calibrated to the medians of the stores we audited (performance 31, LCP 9.0 s, 5.5 MB, 41 menu links).

Deliverables

Packages used

Project

Store Redesign

  • Navigation and category map
  • Homepage and product page templates, mobile-first
  • Image pipeline: AVIF/WebP, responsive sizes, lazy-loading
  • Technical SEO: structured data, meta, alt text, fonts
  • Reviews and shipping/returns blocks on the product page
See this service
Add-on

AI Support Agent

  • Chat assistant set up with the store’s own policies and product notes
  • Answers on shipping times, returns, gifting and scents
  • Hands off to a person; shows which policy it used
  • Launcher and panel designed in the store’s own type and colour
See this service
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