TDM Insights
SEO & AI Advisory
Eight workstreams. One of them was the website.
Cacao Boys makes hand-painted bonbons onsite in Bala. Their site looked pleasant, could not be read by a search engine, could not be quoted by an assistant, and took 21 seconds to show a product on a phone. Replacing it took ten days.
The build was ten days. The decision took longer.
The diagnostic recommended a patch and said plainly that none of this was a rebuild. Sixteen days later we withdrew that advice, because a page-builder runtime sets a ceiling that tuning does not reach. Recommending a larger piece of work after advising against it is uncomfortable, and it was the right call.
Whole-site v0.5 stood up on password-protected staging two days after kickoff. Everything after that was iteration against a live client review queue rather than a first draft.
The slowest page on the site became one of the fastest.
The product page is where the money is, and it was the worst page they had. A shopper on a phone waited 21.5 seconds to see the chocolate they had clicked. Bar length is load time, so shorter is faster.
| Measure | Old site | Live site |
|---|---|---|
| Product page, desktop score | 42 | 99 |
| Shop and category, desktop score | 81 to 93 | 100 |
| Cumulative layout shift, all pages | not measured | 0 |
| Accessibility, range across pages | 79 to 92 | 97 to 100 |
Shop and the bonbons category are the weakest live pages on mobile at 74 and 73. The heaviest single file on both is a 160KB third-party analytics tag; blocking it in a controlled test recovered roughly a quarter of a second. Reported as a lead, not as an excuse.
A custom theme, with no page builder underneath it.
The photography was the strongest asset the business had, and it was sitting inside a stock theme that undercut it. BeTheme and Elementor were replaced with a purpose-built design system, and the shop's own language was rewritten around what it actually sells: painted edible art, made in Bala, bought as a gift.
Each category archive carries its own hero and its own opening copy rather than one generic line, so a shopper landing on Seasonal from search reads about seasonal chocolate. The hero images run on a seasonal rotator that shipped alongside the theme as a reusable plugin, so the shop can set up its own autumn and holiday takeovers without us.
The workstream that is easiest to underestimate.
A WooCommerce catalogue is a database, and this one had grown for three years without an owner: duplicated boxes, a merch tail longer than the chocolate range, and product images that cropped badly in the grid. It was the largest single workstream in the rebuild.
One square per product. Merch is the longest row in the catalogue: 71 t-shirts and hats against 112 chocolate products, which is the imbalance the category restructure had to solve.
Every bulk operation ran with a manifest and a one-command restore. The image work never overwrote an original: each squared file was imported as a new attachment and the product's thumbnail repointed, with the previous value captured first.
A setting can be switched on and still do nothing.
A checkout audit was not in the brief. Rebuilding the templates meant reading the store configuration, and in three places that configuration did not match what the site was telling customers.
Also closed at cutover: card payments flipped from test to live and verified server-side, search-engine visibility re-enabled so canonicals resolved sitewide, and order confirmation emails fixed after they were found failing domain authentication.
A platform move is where rebuilds quietly lose what they already had.
The redirect map was built from evidence rather than assumption, from three sources that each catch what the others miss.
URLs the old site published, taken from its own sitemap rather than a crawl that could miss orphans.
Pagination, feeds and legacy category paths that were linked and live but never listed in the sitemap.
Search Console history, so the map was driven by what had earned a visit, not by what happened to exist.
That produced a 41-row map, of which ten rules run at the CDN edge and the rest are handled inside the theme. Six of the ten flatten the old /product-category/ base onto clean category URLs. The other four retire pages whose content moved: the old gallery folds into About, the menu into the cafe page, and /gifts-and-merch/ becomes /merch/, which carried more search impressions than any other redirect in the map.
| Verified after cutover | Result |
|---|---|
| URLs with Search Console history still reachable | 79 of 79 |
| Sitemap URLs requested individually, returning 200 | 199 of 199 |
| Sitemap URLs that redirect rather than resolve | 0 |
| Legacy URLs still returning 404, none with traffic | 5, down from 10 |
For a local shop, being quotable is the same problem as being findable.
The old site ran without an SEO plugin, so it had no descriptions, no controlled titles and no structured data beyond what WooCommerce emits by default. Customers who ask an assistant where to buy chocolate near Bala had nothing to be pointed at.
| Signal | Old site | Live site |
|---|---|---|
| Meta descriptions | 0 sitewide | Unique on every page |
| Pages with no H1 | 81 of 150 | 0 |
| Title length | Up to 101 chars | 47 to 51 chars |
| Schema types per page | Product only | 12 to 22 |
| Google's Lighthouse SEO score | Not comparable | 100 on every page |
Answer-engine readiness on the category page
Seven signals, scored 0 to 100, before the change and after launch.
The site average moved from 34, the not-citable band, to 81. The bonbons category was the last page in the partial band and cleared it after one plain-language paragraph went in above the product grid. Question coverage did not move, because that signal only responds to an FAQ block, which the category and product pages still do not carry.
Everything that shipped.
A rebuild is quoted as one line on an invoice. This is what the line contained.
- +Custom WordPress theme replacing BeTheme and Elementor
- +Design-system tokens, type scale and component CSS
- +Homepage: hero, collection grid, craft, events, visit, FAQ
- +Shop archive with category tabs and per-category hero copy
- +Product page redesign with spec panel and gallery
- +Build-a-box builder skin across six box sizes
- +Cart and checkout restyled inside the theme wrapper
- +About, in-store cafe, events, contact and wholesale pages
- +Mobile navigation, search panel and footer directory
- +Seasonal hero rotator shipped as a reusable plugin
- +135 products given a short summary and a long description
- +Per-product SEO titles and meta descriptions
- +Category restructure and shop tab reordering
- +Assorted boxes merged into a single Custom Boxes category
- +175 product images re-squared with adaptive padding
- +Image alt text completed across the grids
- +60 nutrition labels reconciled to products
- +Allergen lines drafted for merchant verification
- +Wholesale gating at a $300 and five-piece minimum
- +Reversible manifests and one-command restores throughout
- +WooCommerce shipping zones and rates rebuilt
- +Free-shipping threshold made a single source of truth
- +Filter to hide the paid rate once free shipping qualifies
- +Pickup-date rule repaired after silent failure
- +Seasonal shipping pause with a dated re-enable
- +Card payments switched from test to live and verified
- +Order confirmation email authentication fixed
- +Events and contact form delivery tested
- +SEO plugin installed and configured from zero
- +Unique meta description written for every page
- +One H1 per page across the site
- +Organization and Store entity graph on every page
- +Product, Offer and Brand markup on product pages
- +Cafe menu schema and AboutPage markup
- +17 question and answer pairs written and marked up
- +Answer-first opening copy on category archives
- +Yoast sitemap replacing the WordPress default
- +Redirect map built from sitemap, crawl and search data
- +Host move from SiteGround to Kinsta
- +Edge redirect rules and theme-level legacy handling
- +All 199 sitemap URLs verified at 200 after cutover
- +72 orphaned staging tables dropped after backup
- +Search-engine visibility re-enabled, canonicals restored
- +Security pass closing a personal-data exposure
- +Baseline audit of the old site across 6 pages
- +Full-page captures of both sites for comparison
- +PageSpeed medians, mobile and desktop
- +Seven-signal answer-engine audit, before and after
- +Controlled third-party tag cost test
- +Synchronised side-by-side scroll video, 8 pages
A tune-up can become a rebuild. We tell you which, and why.
Every engagement opens with a diagnostic on a short call: the technical blockers capping your visibility, each with its fix, and an honest read on whether your platform can be tuned or needs rebuilding. Accessible hourly and fixed-fee arrangements, so the scope fits the business.
The deliverable. A diagnostic report: the blockers capping your visibility ranked by impact, each with a fix, the answer-engine gaps keeping you out of AI results, and a clear recommendation on optimize versus rebuild with the cost of each. Yours to execute, with us, or on your own.