Overview

Scent It is a Pakistani fragrance brand selling designer impressions, blends, and original perfumes. With a catalog spanning hundreds of SKUs across men’s, women’s, and unisex categories, they needed an e-commerce store that could handle real traffic — especially during sale periods — while delivering an experience that matched the premium feel of their products.

Phase 1 — Getting Online Fast

The initial build used Elementor with a free theme to get the store live quickly. WooCommerce handled the product catalog and orders. The site worked, but it came with a problem that became harder to ignore as the business grew: it was slow. Page load times suffered under Elementor’s bloat, and on shared hosting, any traffic spike — particularly during sales — would push the site to its limits.

Phase 2 — Rebuilding for Performance

Rather than patching the existing setup, we made the decision to start clean. Elementor was removed entirely and the front-end was rebuilt with custom code — giving us full control over what loaded and when. The result was a significantly lighter codebase with none of the unused CSS and JavaScript that page builders carry by default.

Around the same time, the site was migrated from shared hosting to a dedicated server with proper resources. This addressed the infrastructure bottleneck that no amount of front-end optimization could fully compensate for.

Custom Feature — Magnetic Cap Upsell

Scent It sells an optional magnetic bottle cap as an add-on. This wasn’t something WooCommerce handled out of the box, so we built a custom solution: a per-product checkbox on the product page that adds a fixed Rs. 250 charge to the cart when selected. Small feature, but it directly supports revenue and required clean custom code to implement correctly without breaking the existing cart and checkout flow.

Design Approach

The store needed to feel premium without being cold. A dark color scheme — deep blacks and charcoals — was used throughout to evoke the luxury fragrance market, while the gold bottle caps in the product photography naturally carried warmth and richness through every page.

The homepage is structured to guide discovery: new arrivals, most loved, a featured “Crown Jewel” product, then segmented browsing by Unisex, Men, and Women. Product images — styled with creative backgrounds matching each fragrance’s character — do the heavy lifting on visual appeal.

Category pages use a clean 4-column grid with badge labels (Best Sellers, For Men, etc.) making it easy to scan a large catalog quickly.

Results

The performance overhaul had a measurable impact. The site now handles thousands of concurrent visitors without degradation — something the old shared hosting setup simply couldn’t do.

A 35% bounce rate for an e-commerce store is strong — it means the majority of visitors are actually exploring the catalog. The 3m 45s average session duration suggests the browsing experience is working.

Built with WooCommerce, custom PHP and CSS, hosted on a dedicated server.