StickyThings - Rebuilding the Technical Foundation for a Site That Lost Half Its Traffic

StickyThings had the products, the catalogue, and the market position. Then a site rebuild and a Google Core Update combined to cut their organic traffic in half. We were brought in to fix what had broken - structurally, technically, and commercially - and give the business the foundation it needed to recover and grow.

The Brief

StickyThings is a South African eCommerce retailer specialising in wall stickers, wallpaper, murals, decals, acoustic panels, and custom wall art. With over 500 products across 104 categories, the business had built a strong market position and solid organic search visibility to match.

The site was acquired in May 2024 and rebuilt in September 2024. Despite more than 12 months passing since that rebuild, traffic and sales had not recovered. A previous SEO agency had been engaged for six months post-rebuild with little measurable benefit.

RubyWeb was brought in as the technical implementation partner. Our remit covered two connected workstreams: executing a comprehensive technical remediation programme to fix the structural and performance issues preventing recovery, and rebuilding the entire product taxonomy from the ground up – replacing a fragmented, cannibalising category structure with a clean, keyword-targeted architecture designed to rank.

The Challenge

The traffic decline was not the result of a single failure. It was the compounding effect of several structural and technical problems introduced during the site rebuild – problems that made the site susceptible to Google’s November 2025 Core Algorithm Update, which targeted thin content, poor page experience signals, and unnatural backlink profiles.

Between October 2025 and February 2026, estimated organic traffic dropped from 15,391 monthly visits to 7,258 – a 53% decline. Based on a conservative conversion rate and average order value, that represented approximately $4,000 in lost monthly revenue, or over $48,000 annualised if left unaddressed.

  • A plugin conflict between RankMath and Yoast SEO had broken the sitemap configuration - Google could not efficiently discover or crawl the site
  • The site's Cumulative Layout Shift score was 0.534 - more than five times Google's acceptable threshold of 0.1
  • Homepage performance scored 56/100 on Google Lighthouse, with 623 KiB of unused JavaScript loading on every page
  • Product tags were indexed alongside categories and competing for the same search terms
  • Category URLs were nested with parent slugs embedded in subcategory paths, diluting SEO value across pages that should have been distinct ranking targets
  • Fulfilment labels and internal search query phrases had been published as public, indexable taxonomy terms
  • Cart, checkout, and account pages were included in the sitemap, wasting crawl budget on pages with zero SEO value
  • H1 tags on the homepage were hidden via CSS, and navigation labels were rendered via CSS pseudo-content rather than actual HTML text

Our Approach

We approached this as two parallel workstreams that had to land in the right sequence. The technical remediation came first – fixing the sitemap, the plugin conflict, the CLS, and the crawlability issues – because building a clean taxonomy on top of a broken technical foundation would have wasted the content investment.

The taxonomy rebuild was the more strategically complex piece. Rather than simply reorganising what existed, we audited every category, tag, and taxonomy term against keyword intent, search volume, and structural best practice, then produced a complete new taxonomy architecture before implementing a single change.

Architecture & UX Decisions

The plugin migration from RankMath to Yoast was the first and most consequential step, resolving the sitemap conflict and giving the site a single consistent SEO management layer.

The taxonomy rebuild was built around five top-level category pillars – Wallpaper, Murals, Stickers, Decals, and Acoustic Panels. Within each pillar, subcategories were structured around clear, rankable search intent: room-based for high purchase intent terms, function-based for acoustic products, and material or product-type terms where those matched how buyers actually searched.

Four custom taxonomies were created to handle attributes that had previously been misused as categories – Wallpaper Colour, Wallpaper Style, Wallpaper Range/Collection, and Room/Application. Colour terms were moved out of the category structure and into a proper filterable attribute layer. Every URL change was implemented with a full 301 redirect map.

The Build

The full scope covered 33 sequenced steps across plugin management, sitemap configuration, CLS remediation, performance optimisation, taxonomy restructuring, URL management, indexation controls, heading structure, navigation, and image optimisation.

Key deliverables included:

  • RankMath to Yoast SEO migration with meta data import, verification, and complete RankMath removal
  • Sitemap reconfigured and resubmitted in Google Search Console – robots.txt rewritten with correct references and WooCommerce parameter exclusions
  • Noindex applied to cart, checkout, my-account, and non-SEO pages
  • CLS remediated across homepage images, hero slider, font loading, and Elementor CSS
  • LiteSpeed Cache configured with CSS minification, JS deferral, critical CSS generation, WebP conversion, and hero image preload
  • Complete taxonomy rebuild across five category pillars with subcategories structured by room, function, material, and product type
  • Four custom taxonomies created and colour/style terms migrated from category structure to filterable attribute layer
  • Full 301 redirect map implemented for all URL changes
  • Homepage H1 made visible, heading hierarchy corrected site-wide, navigation labels converted to actual HTML text
  • Image bulk optimisation and WebP conversion run

The Outcome

Post-remediation Google Lighthouse scores: Performance 99/100, Accessibility 90/100, Best Practices 96/100, SEO 100/100.

Core Web Vitals post-remediation: First Contentful Paint 0.5s, Largest Contentful Paint 0.7s, Total Blocking Time 80ms, Cumulative Layout Shift 0.015, Speed Index 0.8s.

CLS moved from 0.534 to 0.015. Performance moved from 56 to 99. The SEO score reached a perfect 100.

Beyond the benchmarks, StickyThings now has a taxonomy that works with Google rather than against it. The structural and technical problems that made the site vulnerable to the November 2025 Core Update have been resolved. The business is positioned to recover lost rankings and pursue the organic growth trajectory that its product range warrants.

Frequently Asked Questions

The decline was caused by a flawed site rebuild combined with Google's November 2025 Core Algorithm Update. The site had vulnerabilities in thin content, poor Core Web Vitals, and crawlability. Without actively fixing the underlying structural and technical problems, Google's crawl cycles continued to demote pages rather than restore them.
Because the sitemap is how Google discovers and prioritises every page on your site. When robots.txt pointed to a sitemap URL that redirected to the homepage, Google was crawling blind - new products weren't being discovered efficiently and updated pages weren't being re-evaluated promptly.
Categories form the primary indexation and navigation structure. Tags are supplementary labels, not designed as standalone ranking pages. Custom taxonomies allow structured filtering by attributes like colour, style, or room without competing with the category structure for search rankings. Getting these three layers right is fundamental to eCommerce SEO.
Colour terms carry real search volume but belong as filterable attributes, not product categories. As categories, they created thin archives with insufficient products to justify indexation and competed with the main category pages. As a custom Wallpaper Colour taxonomy with noindex on thin archives, they support faceted navigation without diluting the category structure.
Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much the page layout moves as it loads. A score above 0.1 fails Google's Core Web Vitals threshold. At 0.534, the StickyThings homepage was more than five times over the limit - a direct contributing factor to the November 2025 ranking losses. Post-remediation the score was 0.015.
The technical work removes the barriers preventing Google from correctly crawling and evaluating the site. The content layer - category descriptions, title tags, meta descriptions, and blog content - drives the actual ranking improvements over the following months. SEO recovery from a Core Update typically takes three to six months to show meaningful traffic gains after the underlying issues are resolved.