1The challenge
Shree Shyam Associate repairs laptops, installs CCTV and networks, and sells IT accessories in Jaipur. Their WordPress site used WooCommerce, Elementor and thirteen plugins, nine of them out of date, plus an outdated WordPress core. A code snippet had disabled the cart and checkout months earlier, so the site was really a catalogue with a WhatsApp button — on a platform that needed constant updates and still had duplicate pages and demo products from the theme.
2What we built
We exported the 87 real products through the WooCommerce Store API (converting its paise prices to rupees), self-hosted every image, and rebuilt the site on Vercel. Pages are rendered by one serverless function that reads the catalogue from a Google Sheet the owner edits — name, price, MRP, images (Drive links work), stock, featured and a Hidden status. Pages are cached for five minutes at the edge, and if the Sheet can't be read the site falls back to the last good catalogue. Every one of the 130 old URLs, including the Jaipur local-service pages, loads or permanently redirects.
3How it works
Before writing any code we listed everything the old site served: pages, product and category URLs, the five local-SEO pages for services in Jaipur, and the junk (duplicate page copies, a sample page and seven demo grocery products). That inventory became the redirect map and the test list.
Products came out of WooCommerce's public Store API as JSON. Its prices are in paise, which is easy to miss and would have shown ₹2,499 as ₹2,49,900. Images were downloaded and hosted with the new site, so nothing depends on the old hosting.
The catalogue lives in a Google Sheet with a 'How to use' tab, dropdowns and price validation, so the owner can add products, change prices, hide items or swap photos without us. The site picks up changes within about five minutes. A response header records whether a page came from the Sheet or the fallback snapshot, which makes problems easy to diagnose.
Every old URL was tested after each deploy. On Vercel, redirect rules for WordPress-style addresses must include the trailing slash or they silently never match — a detail that would otherwise have broken old search results and WhatsApp shares.
The shop now has fast pages on mobile, an enquiry flow that opens WhatsApp directly, the same Google tag for unbroken analytics, and nothing to patch. We wrote up the method in [Moving a Small Business Website Off WordPress](https://howautomate.com/blog/wordpress-to-google-sheet-website).
Built with
- Node.js
- Vercel serverless
- Google Sheets
- WooCommerce Store API
- Google Drive
- WhatsApp click-to-chat
