Website · 2026 · La Sofia, handmade jewellery
La Sofia 2026: redesign, optimisation and marketing
A year after launch we knew what customers did on the site and what slowed them down. The purchased theme loaded five icon fonts and several jQuery plugins, was slow on mobile and every change fought its code. Instead of switching platforms we designed a new look and rebuilt the theme.
- In short
- New design and a custom theme for PrestaShop 8.2.1: one file of design tokens, self-hosted fonts, WCAG AA contrast. The purchased theme stays only as a backup for comparison.
- Custom modules instead of purchased ones: menu, slider, home page, footer, side cart, single-piece reservation, favourites without an account, GTM. Nivo Slider, Owl Carousel and Google Fonts requests went with them.
- Hosting moved from Plesk to our own server under Indepanel, Git deploys, a dev copy on a subdomain. Tracking through GTM and GA4 with Consent Mode v2 and a product feed for campaigns.
Why a second round
The first version of the store did its job: it proved that one-of-a-kind jewellery sells online and collected a year of data. It also showed the limits of the purchased Corano theme: Bootstrap, an animation library and five icon fonts side by side, a jQuery plugin for every module. No image tweaking fixes that, so we went after the cause.
New design and a custom theme
- Look. The new design builds on what a year showed to matter: new arrivals at the top, category tiles, a product card with actions and guest checkout. Colours, fonts and grid live in one token file that all modules use. Gold is used only for backgrounds and borders, text gets a darker shade to pass WCAG AA contrast.
- Custom modules instead of purchased ones. A menu with pure-CSS dropdowns, a slider without jQuery, home page, a footer fed from shop settings, a side cart with the piece flying into the cart, favourites and comparison without an account, quick edits in the admin. Purchased modules were unhooked, not uninstalled, so going back is a single hook.
- Reserving a single piece. Every piece exists once and PrestaShop reduces stock only when an order is confirmed. A custom module keeps a piece in someone's cart unavailable to others for a set time, so two people never pay for the same one.
- Speed. Playfair Display and Lato self-hosted and subset for Czech, a sticky header without scripts, product thumbnails recomputed at the exact resolution of the originals, no external fonts in the new part of the theme.
Hosting and marketing
- Migration from Plesk. The store runs on our server under Indepanel: code in Git, automatic deploys, a dev copy on a subdomain and a local Docker environment matching production. Payments and shipping (Comgate, Zásilkovna, PPL, QR payment) were left untouched.
- Tracking and campaigns. A custom Google Tag Manager module, GA4 with Consent Mode v2 and conversions for ad platforms, a product feed for Google Merchant. Independency runs the campaigns, so the site and the ads are tuned from one place.
What is next
PrestaShop stays on 8.2.1 because half of the modules do not support version 9. For the next step we have a headless storefront on Vendure and Next.js ready with our own catalogue migration; we will switch when it makes business sense, not because it is technically interesting.
Screens
La Sofia 2026 screens
Contact
Have a project? Write to us.
A few sentences about what you are dealing with is enough. We reply within one working day with questions and a proposed approach.