Puravent: Scaling Magento ecommerce for a specialist ventilation retailer

Design and UX

Every successful ecommerce project starts with understanding the business behind it.

We began with a detailed discovery workshop involving the client, our technical lead and our Head of Design. Together, we reviewed the existing Magento website, identified business-critical functionality that needed to be retained, and explored opportunities to improve the customer experience through new features and streamlined user journeys.

With more than 30,000 products across hundreds of categories, alongside an extensive knowledge base covering air treatment, ventilation and HVAC systems, information architecture became a key focus from the outset. We restructured the site’s navigation and developed a completely new sitemap, making it easier for both customers and search engines to discover products and content.

From there, we produced detailed wireframes that mapped every stage of the customer journey, from product discovery through to enquiry and purchase. Interactive tools, including Puravent’s specialist calculation tools, were carefully planned to ensure they integrated naturally into the browsing experience.

Following several collaborative design reviews, the final interface was created in Adobe XD. Particular attention was given to simplifying the primary navigation and improving the flow through complex product categories, helping customers find the right products more quickly.

The end result was a complete visual refresh that modernised the website while remaining true to the established Puravent brand.

Magento development

Following approval of the designs, development began on a bespoke Magento 2 solution.

Alongside Magento’s powerful ecommerce functionality, we developed a range of custom features tailored specifically to Puravent’s business processes and the needs of its customers. Key functionality included:

• Tiered pricing for volume purchases
• Hidden pricing with “Enquire for Price” functionality
• Customer and trade enquiry forms
• Product comparison functionality
• Supplier manuals and technical documentation attached to products
• Dynamic injection of Puravent branding into supplier PDF documents
• Bespoke HVAC calculation tools
• A resource centre containing articles, guides and videos
• PDF generation for both product pages and knowledge base content
• Custom CSV import and export tools for efficient bulk management of tens of thousands of products

The result was a highly customised Magento platform that combined enterprise-level ecommerce functionality with bespoke tools designed specifically for the ventilation industry.

Magento migration

Replacing an established Magento website required a carefully planned migration strategy.

We migrated the complete catalogue, including products, categories, customer accounts and historical order data, while ensuring the integrity of the existing data was maintained throughout the process.

As the new Magento 2 platform introduced additional product functionality and a revised data structure, we developed bespoke migration scripts to transform and import the data into the new format. This allowed existing information to be preserved while supporting the enhanced capabilities of the new website.

Extensive testing and validation were carried out to ensure product information, customer accounts and historical orders were accurately transferred before launch.

Launch

Launching a large Magento ecommerce website requires careful planning to minimise downtime and protect data integrity.

As the development project spanned several months, we performed a final synchronisation immediately before launch to migrate any new products, customers and orders that had been created on the existing website since the initial migration.

Early on the morning of launch, before normal trading hours, the existing website was placed into maintenance mode. This temporarily prevented new orders from being placed, ensuring the production data remained unchanged while the final migration took place.

Once the Magento 2 platform had been fully synchronised, we completed our comprehensive go-live checklist, including performance testing, configuration validation and the implementation of a full 301 redirect strategy.

Because the new website introduced a cleaner, more SEO-friendly URL structure, every important page from the previous Magento site was permanently redirected to its new equivalent. This preserved existing search engine rankings, ensured a seamless experience for returning customers and prevented broken links across the website.

Following final quality assurance checks, the DNS was updated, the maintenance page removed, and the new Magento 2 website was successfully launched with minimal disruption to the client’s business.