The whole thing in one breath
Your website is slow, heavy, and hard for Google and AI to read — not because anyone did anything wrong, but because it is built on ageing technology. The fix is to move the shop to Shopify and the rest of the site to Astro. Simpler, faster, and yours.
How fast it feels
People wait about four seconds before your site does anything — and most won’t wait.
Your homepage is around 30 MB to load — roughly fifteen times heavier than it should be — and the server takes 4 seconds just to start replying. On fast office broadband you’d never notice. On a phone at the market, or a rural Otago connection, it’s a real wait.
Being found
When someone asks Google or ChatGPT “where can I buy organic food in Dunedin?”, your site is hard for them to read.
More and more people find shops by asking an AI assistant, not by scrolling a list of links. Your site scores 33 out of 100 for how easily those tools can read and recommend you. The good news: the words and content are fine — it’s the ageing structure holding them that gets in the way.
What it’s built on
It’s an ageing WordPress setup with a shop plugin and a stack of add-ons that all need babysitting.
The site runs on WordPress with the Divi page builder and the WooCommerce shop plugin, plus ten or more other plugins. Every one needs updating, any one can break the others, and each is a door an attacker can try. It’s why the site is heavy and slow — and why keeping it safe is a constant, quiet job. (Small tell: the site’s colours are still Divi’s factory blue and orange, so it was never quite made your own.)
Your shop
Your shop is big and brilliant — but the categories underneath it are tangled and full of typos.
You’ve got around 80 product categories, which is a real asset. Underneath, though, the web addresses have typos baked in — “deordarants”, “gluten-fee” instead of free, a category name cut off halfway — and sections have been duplicated over the years. A grocery of this size deserves a shop platform built for retail, where all of that is tidy and looked after for you.
Selling grains & fruit by weight
Yes — Shopify can sell your grains and fruit by weight. It just needs the right add-on, and we know exactly which ones.
Out of the box, Shopify sells things in fixed units, not by the kilo. That’s the one real question for a shop like yours, so we looked into it properly. Here’s the exact set-up that handles weighing, refills and loose produce — in the shop and online.
Filljoy — Sell by Weight · at the counter
Weigh grains, fruit, refills or deli items on the till, scan the barcode, and it does the per-kilo maths and rings it up. Built for exactly your kind of shop.
A weight price calculator · online
Lets an online shopper choose, say, 500g of almonds and see the live price from a per-kilo rate — so the same weighed goods work on the website, not just in store.
Unit pricing display · transparency
Shows the “per 100g” or “per kg” price next to each item, the way good grocers do — honest, easy to compare, and in step with how New Zealand shops price food.
Order tidy-up for fresh produce · built in
For fruit and veg where the exact weight varies, Shopify charges an estimate, then we adjust to the real weight after it’s picked. Built into Shopify — no extra app needed.
These are small monthly add-ons paid to Shopify, not a custom build — so your weigh-and-sell range is handled from day one, without the plugin fragility you have now.
The move, and why
Split the job in two: Shopify runs the shop, Astro runs the pages people read. Each does one thing brilliantly.
Right now one ageing platform is doing both jobs, and doing both slowly. We move you off WooCommerce and Divi onto two specialists that talk to each other, so it still feels like one site — just far lighter and easier to look after.
Astro
Your story, cafe, bakery, gardens, health rooms
- Built ahead of time, so they load almost instantly
- Easy for Google and AI to read and recommend
- A fraction of the weight — kind on phones and data
- Simple for your team to edit, no developer needed
Shopify
Groceries, produce boxes, refills, weighed goods
- Payments, stock, GST and delivery all handled for you
- Kept secure by Shopify — nothing to patch or babysit
- Sells by weight properly, with the add-ons above
- A trusted checkout your customers already know
And in the move we tidy the tangled categories, fix the typos, and set up redirects so you keep your place in Google.
A site that reflects the care you put into everything else.
We build websites to be fast, easy to find, and genuinely useful — the sort customers pick, not just admire. Solid underneath, and never left for you to babysit. You’d own all of it outright: the site, the shop, the domain.
What’s next: a separate costed plan comes with this, laying out the full move to Shopify and Astro — scope, timeline and a monthly payment plan to suit your cashflow. Nothing on your current site changes until you’re ready.