SHOPIFY · HEADLESS BUILD · ONGOING PARTNERSHIP · MARCH 2025
CardsHQ. Headless storefront migration.
cardshq.com →~4×
Online sales growth, year over year
4893
Mobile site speed score, before / after
83s2.9s
Mobile load time, before / after
~4.4×
Items added to cart, year over year
SOURCE · SHOPIFY REPORTS, GA4 ECOMMERCE, PAGESPEED INSIGHTS · JAN–DEC 2025 VS 2024
THE CLIENT
CardsHQ.
CardsHQ is a sports card retailer with a strong online catalog and a brick-and-mortar location. They sell graded cards, sealed product, and supplies through their Shopify storefront, and the business is operated by Sports Card Investor, LLC.
When Sevenbrand got involved, CardsHQ was a growing brand with real traction and meaningful online revenue. But the storefront couldn't keep up.
THE PROBLEM
A storefront buckling under its own weight.
The site was loading thousands of high-resolution card images from a third-party source on every page render, whether they were being shown or not. The homepage alone pulled 542 separate requests and 97 megabytes of data. On a phone, the page took 83 seconds to show up.
The website manager had tried multiple Shopify apps to fix it. Each one made the problem worse. She knew what was wrong but didn't have the bandwidth to diagnose the root cause or architect a real solution.
HOW IT STARTED
A working fix, before the project was scoped.
Geoff Wilson, CardsHQ's founder, asked Sevenbrand to take a look at the site. Rather than quoting a project blind, we ran the diagnosis first — identifying the root causes in the image loading strategy, DOM structure, and template architecture.
Then we built a small test build to prove the fix. Using caching and lazy loading, the test loaded the same large card images instantly. The page that took 83 seconds to paint on mobile now rendered in under 3 seconds.
THE WORK
What changed under the hood
Sevenbrand replaced the Shopify storefront theme with a custom storefront built from scratch. The new front end was completely separated from Shopify's back end, which gave us full control over how the site renders, how images get loaded, and how the catalog displays on every device.
We cached lazy-loaded images at optimized sizes, replaced the bloated theme DOM with lean component architecture, redesigned the homepage with a split hero, streamlined filtering, and restructured navigation. We validated GA4 ecommerce and tracked the headless API channel separately for clean attribution.
The result: a storefront that loads instantly on mobile, scales to handle peak traffic, and is built to be improved one feature at a time.
WHAT THEY SAID
“We contracted with Sevenbrand to redevelop the website, and wow did they hit it out of the park. Our website is much faster now, with improved functionality and a better design.”
GEOFF WILSON · FOUNDER, CARDSHQ
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