Posts by Cody Landefeld
The Marketing Meeting No CMO Wants to Have
There’s a particular kind of meeting that every marketing leader eventually finds themselves in. Sales are down. Paid media looks worse than it did a few months ago. Someone has Google Ads open. Someone else is looking at GA4. The ecommerce platform is showing another number entirely. And eventually the conversation turns toward the person…
Read MoreAI Governance: Your Next Security Risk Could Come From Your Team
You think you know what your team has access to. But in the age of AI, the question isn’t just what your employees can do—it’s what AI is capable of doing on their behalf, without anyone even realizing it. For a lot of small and mid-sized e-commerce businesses, AI adoption isn’t happening through a formal,…
Read MoreHow to Safely Update WooCommerce: A Security Guide for Growing Stores
We recently had a client experience a security vulnerability that ended up costing more than $10,000 in remediation. That’s $10,000 spent getting back to where they were before the problem happened. It doesn’t include the internal time spent dealing with it, the projects that got pushed aside while everyone focused on the problem, or the…
Read MoreHow Cloud Free Turned a Stronger Ecommerce Foundation Into Record Sales Growth
A stronger e-commerce platform, better measurement, more effective paid acquisition, and an integrated digital marketing strategy helped Cloud Free achieve a record sales month—including 44% month-over-month net sales growth and 43% growth in orders. For Cloud Free, growth wasn’t simply a matter of sending more visitors to its website. It required bringing the technical and…
Read MoreWhy Mature Subscription Brands Are Reconsidering Shopify
A practical framework for evaluating Shopify, Shopify Plus, and WooCommerce through the lenses of operational fit, total cost of ownership, and responsibility. For years, Shopify has deservedly earned its reputation as one of the easiest ecommerce platforms on which to launch and scale. If you are starting an online business, there is a good chance…
Read MoreHow Southwest Wheel partnered with Mode Effect to become 80% e-commerce driven
For most companies, surviving a decade is an accomplishment. For Southwest Wheel, longevity has always been part of the story. Founded in 1918, Southwest Wheel has spent more than a century serving customers in the trailer parts industry. Over those 107 years, the company has evolved from manufacturing products in-house to becoming one of the…
Read MoreHow Strait Music Replaced a Website That Was Costing Sales with a Platform Built for Growth
Mode Effect helped the Austin-based music retailer move to Shopify, improve product discovery, reduce checkout friction, and build a website their customers, staff, and leadership team could trust. When a customer is ready to buy, your website should make the next step easier. For Strait Music, that was becoming the problem. The team could see…
Read MoreCase Study: How Coastal Medical Training Institute Increased Enrollments by 30% with a High-Performance Website
Overview Coastal Medical Training Institute (CMTI) is an online education provider specializing in allied health courses, helping students gain certifications and enter the workforce quickly. Since launching in 2019, CMTI has focused on accessibility, affordability, and scalable education delivery. But as their business grew, their website—the core engine of their enrollment process—began to hold them…
Read MoreBest WooCommerce Migration Agencies for Enterprise Retailers (2026)
TLDR: Enterprise migrations break when agencies treat them as data transfers instead of multi-phase programs spanning SEO, payments, integrations, and performance. Mode Effect covers the widest service surface for enterprise retailers, combining migration, SEO preservation, performance optimization, and conversion rate work under one roof. Use the WooCommerce migration guide phases as your vetting framework, and…
Read MoreHow to Speed Up WooCommerce Backend in 5 Steps
Slow admin screens waste time and introduce errors into order and product workflows. This five-step plan shows how to speed up WooCommerce backend by measuring performance, applying quick configuration wins, cleaning the database, adding caching and server tuning, and trimming plugin overhead. Each step includes actions you can run on staging and measure so improvements…
Read More