A website refresh for Tumble Tots

Tumble Tots is Britain’s leading physical play programme for children. On their website they say they’ve “been the springboard to developing children’s skills for life for more than quarter of a century”. Whilst we’ve not quite worked with them for that long, we have supported their online shop for almost 10 years.

Late in 2023, we spoke with the Tumble Tots management team about some usability and performance changes we could make to the website. The intention was to try and increase sales by improving the user experience and making the website faster.

In addition, the site was also becoming difficult to manage. There were several plugins which couldn’t be updated. We needed to move to newer versions of WordPress and PHP too.

It was definitely time for a change.

Once we got started, we didn’t feel the need to create a wireframe here, as we normally would, as the existing shop was relatively fit-for-purpose. We knew that we wanted to:

• Give it a design facelift for improved aesthetics
• Move it to a newer WordPress platform for better security
• Rewrite the theme so that the site ran faster
• Improve the user experience by modifying things like the sizes of buttons, changing the position of features such as the search, and labelling some of the calls to action more clearly

This was the first site we’d built which made use of the new basket and checkout blocks for WooCommerce. It also ran the new WooCommerce HPOS (High Performance Order Storage).

We really liked the usability improvements offered in the new basket and checkout blocks. We adopted them for the basket, but because of backward compatibility with a plugin on the site which needed to be retained, we couldn’t use them for the checkout as well. So we have a bit of a half-way house. HPOS seems to work just fine though.

Have a look at their site and see what you think. And if you think we can help you with a new website of your own, please don’t hesitate to get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.