The New Cibdol Website: The Story of the Move

Why we rebuilt instead of redecorated

The new Cibdol website is a complete rebuild of the shop you already know: same company, same formulations, new foundations. The old cibdol.com served us for years. It was built on shop software we had extended, patched and extended again, and like any building that has been added to for long enough, the extensions eventually started arguing with each other. Adding a language meant touching six places. Publishing a batch certificate meant a developer. The product pages and the lab data lived in different worlds and only met when someone carried a number between them by hand.

Architectural drawings a steel ruler and an amber dropper bottle on a pale sunlit workbench

You can keep painting a house like that. At some point it is more honest to build a new one and move.

So that is what we did. Not a redesign: a rebuild, from the foundations, with the things we most wanted to get right treated as structure rather than decoration. This post is the story of the move itself: what we packed, what we left in the old house on purpose, and the one part that mattered more than any feature.

The part that mattered most: you shouldn't have to notice

The best possible outcome of a shop migration is that customers barely register it happened. That sounds like a modest ambition. It is actually the hardest part, and it is where most of the work went.

An open document beside an amber glass dropper bottle in warm daylight

Three things had to survive the move intact:

• every customer login, without a forced password reset
• every order placed on the old shop
• every product rating left over the years: 8,709 of them, across 23 products

Your login. Your password still works. You do not need to reset it, and we never asked you to. Passwords are stored as one-way scrambles, we cannot read yours, which is exactly how it should be, so carrying them across meant building a bridge that recognises the old format, checks your password against it the first time you sign in, and quietly upgrades it to the new one behind the scenes. You type the same password you always did and nothing appears to happen. That invisibility took a fair amount of engineering.

Your order history. Every order placed on the old shop moved with its account: what you bought, when, and what it cost. Order history is not a nice-to-have. It is how you reorder the strength that suited you without having to remember whether it was the 10% or the 15%.

The ratings you left. This one we felt strongly about. Over the years customers rated our products thousands of times, and the easy path, the one plenty of replatforms take, is to start the new shop with a clean slate and five empty stars. We did not want a clean slate. We wanted the honest one. So the ratings came across product by product, with their real counts intact: 8,709 ratings spread over 23 products, the 40% oil arriving with 650 of them, the 30% with 615 and Meladol with 523. Those numbers were earned on the old shop and they still belong to those products.

What we deliberately left behind

Moving is also an opportunity to not pack things.

We left behind claims we could not stand behind. Rebuilding meant reading every line of copy on the old site, and some of it had drifted over the years in the way marketing copy does: a confident sentence written by someone long gone, repeated until it sounded like a fact. Anything we could not trace to a document, a lab result or a person got rewritten or removed. That process is not finished and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

We also left behind the gap between the product page and the lab. On the new site, the batch number printed on your bottle is a thing you can type in. It returns the certificate for that specific batch, not a generic sample, not last year's, yours. The lab data stopped being a PDF someone had to remember to upload and became part of how the shop is built.

The unglamorous half of a rebuild

If you have never watched a shop migration up close, the ratio might surprise you. The visible half, how it looks, how it moves, how a product page reads, is genuinely a minority of the work. The other half is spreadsheets.

Every product needed its barcode checked, so search engines and price comparison sites can tell a Cibdol bottle from anyone else's. Every category needed its address decided, because a URL that changes without a forwarding note is a customer who lands on a dead page. Every one of the six CBD oil strengths, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 and 40 percent, needed its own page rather than sharing one with a dropdown, because they answer genuinely different questions and deserve to be found separately.

None of that is interesting to read about. All of it is the difference between a shop that works and a shop that looks like it works.

What we know is still unfinished

A new building has a snagging list, and pretending otherwise is how you lose people's trust in the first week.

Ours is real and we are working through it in public rather than quietly. Some languages are further along than others: the English and UK stores are complete, and the rest are being written properly rather than run through a translation engine, because a shop that sells something you put in your body should not be described in a language nobody checked. Our editorial section is being reviewed article by article. A handful of products are waiting on photography we are not willing to fake.

We would rather ship a smaller thing that is true than a bigger one that is nearly true. That principle cost us weeks on this project and we would spend them again.

Come and have a look around

The new cibdol.com is the same company, the same Swiss-made formulations and the same Dutch office in Schijndel: in a building that finally suits them. Your account is where you left it. Your password works. The ratings you gave us came with us.

If something on the new Cibdol website looks wrong, tell us. On a new site the first weeks of customer emails are worth more than any amount of internal testing, and we read all of them.

Last updated: August 2026