Eating Our Own Dog Food and Why We Switched to Shopify

Why Rebuild Our Site?

When it came time to rebuild our website, we decided to "eat our own dog food" — a concept ingrained in me from my time at Google. For those unfamiliar with this phrase, it’s the practice of using your products or services in a real-world setting to understand better its strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. For us, this meant moving our site to Shopify.

This transition was more than a redesign; it was about aligning our website with the tools and strategies we use to help clients succeed. Migrating to Shopify gave us the opportunity to refine our skills, test innovative ideas, and better connect with the platform powering most of our clients' businesses.

Why Shopify?

Even though we don’t sell physical products or process payments, moving to Shopify was a natural choice. Helping clients migrate to Shopify — while optimizing SEO, tracking, and analytics — has been a core focus for our agency.

• In 2020, 60% of our clients were on Shopify.
• Today, over 90% of our clients use the platform.

Migrating our site let us immerse ourselves further in the Shopify ecosystem, stay ahead of the curve, and better understand its potential. It also gave us a live environment to test features, plugins, and tracking capabilities.

Old Site vs. New Site

Our old WordPress website served its purpose but lacked the flexibility and functionality we needed to scale. Moving to Shopify allowed us to make significant improvements:

1. A Modern Look and Feel

• Old Site: Functional but outdated. The design and layout were too challenging to navigate quickly, resulting in barriers to quickly understanding our offering. Overreliance on parallax effect and dynamic resizing across devices. 
• New Site: Sleek, modern, and user-friendly. Intuitive navigation makes it easier for visitors to explore what we offer and highlights our expertise.

2. Enhanced Data-Driven Insights

• Old Site: Limited integration with the tools we rely on for analytics and client insights. WordPress does not provide particularly insightful website analytics tools by default, especially regarding audience insights. 
• New Site: We can tap into live data and benchmarking through the Shopify interface. This allows us to experiment with data visualization techniques and refine the insights we deliver to clients.

3. Blog Customization

• Old Site: Clunky and restrictive, making content creation more challenging than it should be. Updates often caused blog formatting to reset, reflecting poorly on our brand and requiring regular, manual work.
• New Site: While Shopify’s blog functionality isn’t perfect, we customized it to create a polished, user-friendly experience that supports our publishing needs. Templates and improved CSS made for a cleaner, more consistent experience. 

4. Real-Time Testing

• Old Site: No capability to test Shopify-specific features or tracking tools.
• New Site: A live sandbox for testing plugins, features, and integrations before rolling them out to clients. 

5. Site Updates and Developer Vetting

• Old Site: None of our clients use WordPress so there is no overlap with the WordPress developers we work with on our own site. 
• New Site: Our clients are always looking for experienced Shopify developers. Shifting our site to Shopify provides an additional opportunity to vet developers that our clients might use in the future.

Enhancing Data Visualization

One of the most exciting aspects of this migration is using Shopify as a live data source.

Our custom dashboards already rely on Shopify data to provide actionable insights. Now, we can experiment with:

• New data visualization techniques
• Better ad platform integrations
• Advanced tracking setups

Until GA4 addresses its limitations, we see combining CMS data, ad platform metrics, and third-party attribution tools as the most reliable way to uncover actionable insights. Our Shopify migration lets us refine this process further.

A big shout out to the multitalented Jacquelyn Farnsworth for designing, illustrating, and coding the site. She was a pleasure to work with and provided the outside perspective our team needed to make this a true redesign rather than a visual + platform refresh. See her work at https://jacalac.com/.

We’re thrilled to share the new foghornlabs.com with you. It’s not just a refresh — it’s a reflection of the tools, strategies, and creativity we bring to every client project.

Explore the new design, and let us know what you think!

Here’s to continuing to grow, innovate, and deliver outstanding results — for ourselves and for our amazing clients. 🚀