Case Study
Multilingual WooCommerce build with a custom block theme
Risto Tõldsep built clarte.ee, a custom WooCommerce store for the Estonian premium skincare brand Clarte. The build uses a fully custom WordPress theme with ACF Gutenberg blocks, Tailwind CSS and a Vite per-block asset pipeline, is multilingual through WPML, and ships with a Mailchimp API newsletter integration and full analytics tracking.
Clarte is a premium skincare brand selling internationally, which puts two demands on the store at once. It has to look premium enough to justify the price, and it has to work correctly in several languages down to product data, checkout strings and media.
Premium usually means heavy: large imagery, motion, sliders. Getting that without a store that crawls is the actual engineering problem.
ACF Gutenberg blocks give the client real editing freedom inside a fixed design system. They can build new pages without being able to produce something off-brand, which is the failure mode of a general-purpose page builder.
Vite builds each block’s CSS and JS separately. A page without a slider never downloads Swiper, which is how a visually rich store stays quick.
WPML covers content, strings and media, so a translated page gets the right localised imagery too rather than falling back to the source language.
GTM, GA4, Search Console, Clarity and Meta Pixel with custom events, configured to show where leads come from and where customers hesitate, rather than just recording pageviews.
A template is fastest on day one and slowest thereafter. For a brand whose whole proposition is that it looks and feels premium, fighting a theme’s assumptions on every page costs more than building the blocks properly once.
With WPML set up properly, yes. The important part is covering strings and media, not just product names, and keeping one catalogue with translations attached rather than parallel stores.
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