A plain-language walk-through of the search, AI-readiness, security, speed, accessibility and reliability work on the new site — for the pre-launch review.
Below is what was done across five areas, and why. The first section answers the question about “optimisation for AI”; the rest covers the behind-the-scenes hardening so the shop is secure, fast, accessible and reliable from day one.
Two halves: clean page structure (so search engines and AI assistants read the pages correctly) and structured data (hidden, machine-readable labels that let Google and assistants describe and recommend the shop accurately).
The previous site had pages with no main heading (H1) at all — a basic but important SEO miss. Every page on the new site now has exactly one clear H1 (the page title) with a logical structure beneath it. I audited every page and fixed the ones that were missing it.
“Optimising for AI” means making the site machine-readable, so assistants like ChatGPT and Google’s AI can understand and accurately recommend the shop. It’s done with structured data — labels embedded in each page that say, in effect, “this is a product, this is its price, these are its reviews, this is the business and where it is.” The site now emits:
| Label | Where | What it tells machines |
|---|---|---|
| Organisation | every page | the brand, logo, social profiles |
| Local Business | home | the physical shop — address, phone, email; the key entity for “near me”, Maps and AI local answers |
| Product | product pages | name, image, description, price & availability — and the star rating + reviews, all on one entity so the stars attach to the product |
| Rating & Reviews | product pages | average rating, review count and individual reviews (when present) |
| FAQ | FAQ page | questions & answers, eligible for FAQ rich results |
| Breadcrumbs | most pages | the navigation path |
| Article / Recipe | blog posts | articles, and recipe posts get full recipe cards (ingredients, steps, time, servings) |
Recipe blog posts can now produce recipe rich cards in Google (and AI recipe answers) — ingredients, steps, cook time and servings. This switches on automatically once a recipe post’s details are filled in; other posts stay as normal articles.
Every page now has a search-result description (the homepage and some pages previously had none, leaving Google to guess the snippet), correct product price tags for shopping/social crawlers, and proper canonical, Open Graph and Twitter tags.
The new review system (submit → you approve → publish) was hardened against the realistic abuse paths: submissions can’t spoof which product a review lands on (the moderation screen always shows the real product), input is validated, the moderation area is protected by a secure session (the access link is used once, never exposed afterward), and there are spam/rate limits so the queue can’t be flooded.
The order feed to your back-office is signature-verified, so forged order notifications are rejected. Access tokens are handled securely and never stored in the website code.
The site was brought in line with WCAG 2.1 AA, which matters for the EU Accessibility Act:
The order → back-office sync was made safe for real bookkeeping: an order is claimed before any record is written (so a repeated notification can’t create a duplicate), and a temporary glitch now triggers an automatic retry instead of silently dropping the order. (The sync is switched on once the one-time product mapping is in place.)
The site and its back-end services were put through an independent, multi-pass review across security, performance, accessibility, SEO and code correctness — and every finding was double-checked before being fixed, so the work addressed real issues rather than false alarms. The site also passes Shopify’s own theme checks with zero warnings.