A few specific fixes for thesweetpetite.co.uk

A few specific fixes for thesweetpetite.co.uk.

The Sweet Petite · Sunderland · website rebuild

I rebuild small-business sites in my spare time when I can see they are leaving conversions on the table. I spent ten minutes on thesweetpetite.co.uk on the morning of 18 May and three things stood out, all on the homepage. What follows is the three findings, what the rebuild does about each, the price, and a link to a working preview you can click through.

No. 01 The OG image is the white-on-cream logo from 2021, not a photo of the afternoon tea.

What I saw. Looked at the source of the live homepage (View Source on Chrome). The og:image tag points at /cdn/shop/files/logosite_1200x1200.png with a ?v= query string that decodes to a February 2021 timestamp. The image itself is the script wordmark on a white background, with no photograph of the cakes, the trailer, or the Mackie's Corner shopfront. Pasted the homepage URL into Slack and WhatsApp on my phone to test the unfurl: both rendered as a blank-looking logo card.

What the rebuild does. The rebuilt /preview/ sets og:image to an absolute 1200x630 hosted hero JPG of the actual afternoon-tea stand. WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack, Google Images and Apple Maps preview cards then surface a stack of cakes against the Mackie's Corner counter, not a logo on white.

No. 02 The 11-year story (wedding cake to Sweet Pea to Mackie's Corner) lives behind a footer link.

What I saw. The homepage at thesweetpetite.co.uk leads with the Shopify Brooklyn theme's small inline logo and the team headshot. The founding story (Laura's 5-tier wedding cake in 2014, the Cotswolds Rice Beaufort horsebox conversion, Summer 2020 at Seaburn beach, the move into the restored Hutchinson's Buildings in 2021) only appears on /pages/about, three clicks from the front door. A first-time visitor scrolling the homepage on a phone never learns that the business has been baking for eleven years or that the shop sits inside a 1845 Victorian building.

What the rebuild does. In /preview/ the heritage is the centrepiece. The hero names Laura and Tommy Graham and gives the year. A dedicated heritage block tells the trailer-to-bricks story alongside a Mackie's Corner Victorian-restoration paragraph. A 2014 / 2020 / 2021 / Today timeline anchors it.

No. 03 Zero schema.org structured data, so Google and Apple Maps see a generic Shopify shop.

What I saw. grep -c 'application/ld+json' on the served homepage HTML returns 0. There is no LocalBusiness, no Bakery, no PostalAddress, no openingHoursSpecification, no AggregateRating despite 362 reviews at 4.9 stars on Restaurant Guru, and no FAQPage despite the most common customer questions (booking, portion size, hours) appearing in every review. Google sees a Shopify storefront with no Sunderland anchor.

What the rebuild does. The rebuild emits one inline application/ld+json block at build time with @type ["LocalBusiness","Bakery"], the SR1 1TX PostalAddress, telephone in E.164, openingHoursSpecification for Wed-Sun, an AggregateRating reflecting the public review profile, plus a FAQPage on the four questions reviewers raise most.

One fixed price. No retainer.

£2,000Fixed for the rebuild, one-off.

£150Per month for hosting and ongoing care.

£50Optional. Embedded chatbot trained on your FAQs.

No retainer. No contract. No in-person visits, fully remote from Switzerland.

One round of revisions before launch

DNS cutover handled (you keep the domain in your name)

30 days of post-launch tweaks at no extra cost

Source code handed over on day 60 (you own everything)

Worth answering up front.

What happens to the existing Shopify shop and customer accounts?

The marketing site moves to Astro on Vercel. The Shopify storefront either stays on a sub-domain (shop.thesweetpetite.co.uk) for the cake-counter and gift-card transactions, or moves to a Shopify "lite" tier where the marketing site links straight into the existing product pages. Customer accounts and order history are not touched. Decision depends on how active the Shopify side is, happy to look at the admin and recommend.

How would the afternoon-tea booking flow change?

It stays exactly as it is today, just with a clearer entry point. If you use Resy / OpenTable / a Shopify product as the booking surface, the rebuilt homepage links directly to it from a single CTA above the fold. If you would prefer a simple email-form booking (sent to Events@thesweetpetite.co.uk), I will wire that in instead. No customer-facing change to how a booking gets made.

How long does this take and what do you need from me?

Three weeks end-to-end. Week one: typography-led homepage with the trailer-to-bricks story, real photos. Week two: per-section service blocks (afternoon tea, the cake counter, Sweet Pea hire), schema.org markup, og:image generation, FAQ. Week three: contact form wiring, DNS cutover, Shopify backend kept where it is. From you: an hour on a video call at kickoff, photos you are happy to use, a short read-through at the end of weeks one and two.

What about the £350,000 Mackie's Corner restoration angle, is that worth telling?

Yes, briefly. The Sweet Petite was one of the first independents to open in the restored Hutchinson's Buildings, backed by a Historic England + Sunderland City Council grant. It is the kind of local-context line that earns trust from Sunderland visitors and from press. The rebuild names the building, names the year (1845), and names Ralph Hutchinson the timber merchant, but the focus stays on your own 11-year story.

If the proposal lands.

If the proposal lands, reply with two or three 20-minute slots in the next ten days for a video call. I take on three Sunderland builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 28 May, the proposal site comes down.

See the live rebuild

A working preview you can click through.

Opens in this tab. Photos, palette, schema, the lot.

Open /preview/ ↗