Improving website speed, SEO and company efficiency for a leading B2B supplier of safety equipment.
The Fletcher Stewart B2B ecommerce project involved a B2B feature redesign to enhance customer experience, with a fast Hyvä frontend and consolidation of four websites into one to improve internal efficiency.
Established in 1967, Fletcher Stewart specialises in the distribution of industrial safety products. It operates through a network of retailers covering the UK, and with appointed distributors as far away as Japan and Australia.
The company is one of the market leaders in distributing products to the Forestry and Arboricultural, Industrial Work Safety and Outdoor Leisure industries in the UK and abroad.
Fluid Commerce has worked with Fletcher Stewart since June 2024, delivering multiple projects to resolve longstanding issues that the client was unable to resolve with their previous Magento development agency.
We have built a strong, communicative relationship with Fletcher Stewart and in early March 2025, we proposed a solution to update the company’s ecommerce website to allow the company to attract and retain more customers, while also improving the efficiency of its business operations.
Nigel Fletcher, director at Fletcher Stewart
Fletcher Stewart had the following requirements for the project:
We reviewed all of these objectives and quickly established that this project was suitable for our rapid deployment B2B accelerator solution Portal, teamed with further development work to complete the more complex aspects of the project. Portal has been developed with B2B at the forefront of its features for both the customer and the merchant and works with both Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce ecommerce platforms.
Portal has also been built with Hyvä, a front-end theme for incredible page load speed and user experience. The previous Fletcher Stewart site utilised the Luma front end theme, and migration to a Hyvä front end was a key part of Fluid’s proposal for the website update. We have migrated numerous B2B clients to Hyvä as it provides unparalleled user experience, functionality and speed.
We have also completed many consolidation projects for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source websites. We understand that consolidating websites brings many challenges, as it involves bringing together products, orders and customers into one main source of truth. If mistakes are made with the consolidation, the consequences for the merchant and the customer can be catastrophic.
The final proposal was to create an exceptional brand experience for Fletcher Stewart’s brand sites, STEIN & SOVOS. The risk, as always, of consolidating websites is that a good experience is not created for landing pages that serve as signposts to the new website. We proposed creatives that captured the brand authenticity, creating a smooth transition for customers being directed to the new Fletcher Stewart website.
In June 2025, Fluid launched the new Fletcher Stewart ecommerce website; a B2B feature-rich ecommerce platform that has given the client and their customers a completely new shopping experience.
Fluid’s Magento specialist developers were able to complete the Magento upgrade side of the project in just a few weeks as we have a fast, clean system for rolling out upgrades. We advised Fletcher Stewart to partner with one of our preferred hosting providers, CoreFinity, and as a result, we were able to deploy the upgrade onto the new environment whilst business-as-usual work took place on the current hosting.
The new site has consolidated the client’s four previous websites into one, allowing customers from all previous sites to login into the new site to purchase, view past orders and manage their accounts. Our approach unified all of the data correctly and the customer now only logs in through one website, giving them access to more categories and a deeper product range.
The consolidation will help to improve SEO for Fletcher Stewart as previously they had category pages competing against each other. It has also helped to improve efficiency at the company as the internal team is now looking after data for one website, instead of four.
Customers now have the following B2B features across their account;
To add to this, the user experience is now enhanced by features such as;
Fletcher Stewart’s Core web vitals / Lighthouse scores have dramatically improved across the board on all devices. As the data shows below, Performance metric and Speed Index Score both score highly.
Page | Desktop before Hyva | Desktop After Hyva | Mobile before Hyva | Mobile After Hyva |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Homepage | 54 | 97 | 34 | 80 |
Category | 54 | 96 | 29 | 93 |
Product Page | 49 | 99 | 12 | 95 |
Speed Index Score
Page | Desktop before Hyva | Desktop After Hyva | Mobile before Hyva | Mobile After Hyva |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Homepage | 4.6 | 1.7 | 25.1 | 4.0 |
Category | 6.3 | 1 | 20.8 | 3.3 |
Product Page | 4.7 | 1 | 15.1 | 3.1 |
TTFB (time to first byte) has also dramatically improved, demonstrating that the move to CoreFinity was positive.
The video below compares the speed of the new Fletcher Stewart website compared to the old version.
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