A store we built, and run, ourselves.
The Island Earth is Shaun Wilson Designs’ own print-on-demand store: retro-cosmic gifts made to order in Louisville. It runs on WooCommerce with Printful handling production and fulfilment, and it is where every caching rule, plugin choice and speed claim on this site gets tested against real orders before it is offered to a client.
Shaun Wilson Designs
Louisville, Kentucky
WooCommerce + Printful
Design, build, hosting, ops
Six hundred products, made one at a time.
A print-on-demand store has a problem an ordinary shop never faces: every product is one-of-a-kind on demand, so the catalogue, feeds, inventory and checkout all have to behave as if stock is infinite and delivery is out of our hands. The site had to stay fast under that load while shoppers never see a hint of the machinery.
It also had to be honest evidence. If we sell WooCommerce, caching and Cloudflare to clients, our own store has to prove those choices under real orders, real refunds and real Google Shopping scrutiny.
Running our own store keeps us honest.
Every caching rule and speed claim on this site was tested against real orders first.
Exact screens, not mockups.
These are direct browser captures of the live site at 1440 and 390 pixels. Nothing redrawn, nothing staged.
The work, piece by piece.
WooCommerce catalogue
More than 600 made-to-order products, wired to Printful so an order placed on the site is printed and shipped without anyone touching it.
Google Shopping feeds
Live product feeds and inventory sync so the catalogue appears in Google Shopping with correct pricing and availability.
Checkout tuned for on-demand
A checkout built for a store whose every product is unique, with shipping and tax handled for print-on-demand fulfilment.
Cloudflare caching for a shop
Pages cached at the edge for speed, while cart, checkout, account and the cart-fragments endpoint are never cached, so no shopper ever sees another shopper’s basket.
Dedicated server migration
Moved onto Shaun Wilson Designs’ own dedicated server in September 2026, with server-side page caching and current PHP.
Design system
A dark, editorial storefront that lets the product art lead, built in Kadence so the catalogue and pages stay editable.
Built for every screen it will meet.
600+
Made-to-order products in the catalogue
0.5s
Homepage origin response, down from about 0.8
0.42s
Cart origin response, down from about 0.75
0.2s
Typical cached page for a visitor
Origin response roughly halved, on every page.
After moving the store to the dedicated server, origin response roughly halved across the site: the homepage from about 0.8 to 0.5 seconds, the shop from about 0.9 to 0.5, and the cart from about 0.75 to 0.42. Visitors on cached pages see them in around 0.2 seconds.
Running our own store keeps us honest. Every caching rule, every plugin choice and every speed claim on this site has been tested against real orders first.
Built in Louisville, for Louisville and Southern Indiana.
Shaun Wilson Designs is a one-person web design and WordPress development studio in Louisville, Kentucky, working with businesses across Louisville and Southern Indiana: custom WordPress websites, custom WordPress plugins, WooCommerce stores, website redesigns and WordPress recovery. See more of the work in the project portfolio.
Tell me what you are building.
One conversation, one builder, a clear next step. The person you brief is the person who does the work.
