Kruidvat’s redesign shows how to modernise without sacrificing conversion
When one of the Benelux’s largest drugstore chains rebuilds its webshop from scratch, other merchants should pay close attention. Kruidvat has launched a fundamentally new site built on a headless architecture, decoupling the presentation layer from its backend to allow faster iteration on the customer-facing experience. The technical choice is notable, but the editorial story here is what the team chose to protect during that rebuild.
Conversion learnings from the old site were deliberately carried forward. Years of behavioural data, optimisation cycles, and validated UX patterns were not abandoned in the excitement of a fresh start. That discipline separates successful platform migrations from costly ones. Redesigns that discard proven drop-off reducers in favour of visual novelty routinely see conversion dip in the months after launch, a painful lesson that Kruidvat appears to have studied carefully.
The decision to align the new webshop with the Kruidvat app, which was redesigned two years ago and has since demonstrated its UX model, is equally instructive. The team mapped which design principles could carry across channels and where app and browser demand different solutions. The framing they settled on, consistent but channel-specific, is the right one. A shopper toggling between the app and a desktop browser should not feel they are dealing with two separate retailers. That sense of continuity directly affects trust and willingness to complete a purchase.
For Dutch and Belgian merchants evaluating platform migrations, the message is practical. Headless architecture buys flexibility and development speed, but those gains only translate into commercial results if the UX layer on top is anchored in real customer behaviour rather than design trends. The rebuild is an enabler, not the outcome. The outcome is a checkout journey that converts at least as well as the one it replaced, and ideally better.
Mid-to-large merchants running ageing monolithic platforms will recognise the pattern Kruidvat faced: a system that worked well in its time but gradually became a brake on iteration. The answer is not to wait until the platform fails, but to migrate with conversion continuity as a hard requirement from day one.
Source: kruidvat.nl
