How UX Doubled Sales for a 100 Year Old Brand

We are kicking Season 2 of Interface Insights by Design Studio UI/UX off with a real case study of Halmari Tea, an Assam-based brand with a 100-year old legacy. Even though it is a reputed brand, its website was doing a disservice, undoing its legacy. Over 55% of their traffic was on mobile, but nearly half of users were bouncing before pages even loaded, and a century of legacy was buried on page two of Google.

In this episode, our host Ishika will discuss the changes we have implemented for Halmari Tea, the reasons they worked, and how they have improved the website’s UX and SEO. We did all of this within a 3-month window.

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Transcript

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Hello everyone, welcome back. This is Ishika and this is season 2, which still feels a little hard to believe to finally announce. If you have been here since season 1, thank you genuinely. And if you're new, then let me tell you you have picked a good episode to start with. Quick thing before we dive into the next season, here is a small recap of season 1, which was largely about ideas. Each episode explored topics like banking UX, AI and design, and how friction quietly breaks users' trust, unpacking not just the ideas themselves, but why they matter. But somewhere along the way, I kept asking myself, okay, but what does this actually look like when someone does it on a real project with the real client and real result on the other side? That question wouldn't leave me alone. So season two is the answer real projects, real decision, and what came out of them. Over 100 years old, based in Assam, one of the India's most iconically growing regions. Premium blends, global reach, a rock solid offline reputation. But their website was telling a completely different story. Slow, cluttered, confusing to navigate, and basically invisible on Google. More than 55% of the traffic was coming from mobile, but the site wasn't built for it at all. Small buttons, overflowing text, a checkout experience on phone that felt like a test you hadn't studied for. People were landing, struggling for a few seconds and leaving. And Google was watching all of that: the high bounce rates, the low session times, and kept pushing the site further down. A brand with over a century of legacy was ranking on page 2 or 3 for the exact keywords their customers were actively searching for. The project was handled by a small team, one UX designer, one SEO specialist, and a 3-month window to make it work. And the first thing they did wasn't open a design tool, they went straight to the data, Hajjar Google Analytics, simply observing how real users moved to the site. What they found was stark. Nearly 50% of users were leaving product pages before the pages had even fully loaded. Not because the brand wasn't compelling, the experience just wasn't fast enough to keep people there. Now you have something clear to work with. Take the mobile experience. The team designed everything for mobile first, starting with the smallest screen and then scaling up with larger tap areas. Thumb-friendly interaction and checkout forms that remembered user details to browser autofill. On the surface, that sounds like a pure UX decision. You are simply making the site easier to use on a phone. But what actually happens when you do that? People stop leaving immediately. They explore more pages, they spend more time on the site, and those behaviors become signals. Search engines interpret them as proof that the experience is useful, relevant, and worth ranking higher. One decision improves both UX and SEO at the same time. The checkout flow is another good example. It went from 5 steps down to just 2 with guest checkout set as the default. For users, that removes one of the biggest reasons people abandon a purchase. Too many steps and too much commitment too early. From a business and SEO perspective, more completed checkout means lower exit rates on those pages, which signals to Google that the experience is working. Real customer testimonials were also added throughout the site, not just as decoration, but because the trust is what truly helps close a sale once the design has done its job. The navigation was rebuilt too, and this part is often overlooked. When users can't find what they came for the leave and they stop exploring. That internal flow helps Google understand your site. So when navigation is clear and intuitive, users go deeper and your site becomes easier for Google to understand. The content was connected in a smart way. Blog posts like Skin Benefits of Black Tea were linked to related product pages. So when someone is reading, they can easily discover what to try next. It feels helpful for users and at the same time, it shows Google the site really knows its topic. If you want to see exactly how this was done, I have linked the full case study by Design Studio UIUX on Halmari in the description. It didn't stop at content, performance was improved too, images were compressed to WebP, media was lazy loaded, and catching was set up properly. The result was a much faster site. Users no longer dropped off before pages loaded, which was the main issue the data had revealed. Fixing load speed directly reduced that 50% drop off, and as the experience improved, Google responded to. Visually, the redesign was intentional too. Earthy greens and pearl-white colors that actually feel like a premium tea times new Roman for headings, old world classic, right for a hundred-year-old brand, clean body text, generous white space, so nothing feels cluttered or rushed, and small interactive details like hover effects that revealed tasting notes, things that don't announce themselves but make the experience feel considered and alive. 3 months later, the site ranked in the top 5 on Google for major T-related keywords. Bounce rate dropped 40%, conversions doubled, load time improved by 30%, and organic traffic grew 10 times over. For Design Studio UIUX, this wasn't just a redesign, it was a complete transformation of how the brand shows up online, turning it from a store into an experience. The product was always great. The difference was that now people could actually find it and trust it. The reason I wanted to start season 2 with the project with this project is because it makes one thing really clear. UX and SEO are not competing priorities. They are and they are not even separate work streams either. Every time you make an experience easier for a human being, you're also making your website clearer, faster, and more meaningful for search engines to interpret. The users who stay longer, clicks through more pages, completes a purchase, and comes back again. That behavior is the signal. Google is just reading it. That's what we are pulling apart this season. How design decision is in real world create real outcomes. Well, that's it for this one. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate you being here. See you in the next one.