The Nunhead Gardener — Site Audit — Quantised
Quantised — Prospect — Cold Outreach
The Nunhead Gardener — Site Audit
Summary
The Nunhead Gardener has genuine local authority — ranking #1 for "garden centre Nunhead" and #2 for "plant shop Peckham" — but the website is actively working against that equity. A TTFB of 1,919ms means real visitors wait nearly two seconds before a single byte renders, collection pages carry no H1 tags and no meta descriptions, and the checkout builds zero trust: no payment icons, no Trustpilot widget, and a footer with none of the five standard commercial signals. The structural cause is a combination of under-configured WooCommerce templates, inadequate hosting or caching, and a site that has grown without an SEO or CRO framework applied to it. The immediate priorities are fixing the homepage heading hierarchy, resolving TTFB through hosting or caching changes, and adding the minimum trust signals that a customer needs before handing over payment details.
TECHNICAL SEO
STATUS
AT RISK
Five H1s on homepage, zero H1s on collection pages, and one 404 linked from homepage.
PERFORMANCE
STATUS
AT RISK
Real-user TTFB 1,919ms and LCP 2,879ms — both well outside Google's good thresholds.
SEARCH VISIBILITY
STATUS
NORMAL
Ranks #1 for "garden centre Nunhead" but sits position 5 for "garden centre South London".
CRO & TRUST
STATUS
DANGER
Stale winter promo live at tablet width with a 404 tile; desktop footer is good but invisible on mobile.
CONTENT
STATUS
DANGER
Winter/New Year campaign still published in September; 43 images missing alt text.
Critical — fix before anything else
- 🔴Homepage contains five H1 tags — all seasonal promotional banners, none describing the business.
- 🔴Every crawled collection page returns an empty H1 and an empty meta description.
- 🔴Real-user TTFB is 1,919ms (threshold 800ms); LCP is 2,879ms; FCP is 2,760ms.
- 🔴URL /product/garden-accessories/garden-tools returns a 404 and is linked from the homepage hero.
- 🔴A stale winter/New Year promotion is still published — Hunker Down, Cosy Up, Winter Colour, New Year New Tools — hidden on desktop and mobile but live at tablet width, where its 'New Year, New Tools' tile links to the /garden-accessories/garden-tools/ 404.
- 🔴'Heatwave Special — 20% off outdoor furniture' is running in a cool, wet September.
High priority
- 🟠Footer trust signals do not render on mobile. On desktop the footer is genuinely strong — four store phone numbers, Delivery & Returns, T&Cs, Privacy, Gift Vouchers, loyalty app and HTA membership — but mobile visitors, who are most of local search traffic, see none of it. (The crawl scored this 0/5, which was wrong.)
- 🟠Zero payment icons and zero trust seals found anywhere on the site, including product and cart pages.
- 🟠"Garden centre South London" sits at position 5 with no dedicated landing page targeting the term.
- 🟠43 images across 20 crawled pages are missing alt text, including 13 of 26 on the homepage.
Medium priority
- 🟡"No Google Knowledge Panel \u2014 brand entity unconfirmed in the knowledge graph despite ranking #1 for brand."
- 🟡Parent category slug is /shop/indoor-pots-2/ — a legacy -2 duplicate with no semantic relationship to house plants.
- 🟡Homepage meta description is 132 characters of generic copy with no CTA, no differentiator, and no local hook.
- 🟡No editorial content found in crawl — no blog, care guides, or seasonal features anywhere on the site.
- 🟡Desktop Cumulative Layout Shift is 0.346 against a 0.1 good threshold — layout shifting after load.
What's working
- ✅"Ranks #1 for \"garden centre Nunhead\" and #2 for \"plant shop Peckham\" \u2014 real local SEO traction in place."
- ✅Branded SERP is clean — position #1 for the brand name, with Trustpilot and Instagram at #3 and #2.
- ✅Real-user INP is 78ms — well within the fast threshold, indicating a lean JavaScript layer.
- ✅Homepage title tag ("The Nunhead Gardener | London based Plant and Garden Shop", 57 chars) is well-formed.
- ✅Product titles use correct botanical nomenclature — captures long-tail queries big-box retailers ignore.
- ✅robots.txt and sitemap.xml both exist and return 200.
- ✅The desktop footer is a real asset — HTA membership displayed with the trade badge, four staffed store numbers, and every policy linked. It only needs to reach mobile.
Prioritised action plan
- ▸🔴 Remove all five H1 tags from homepage banners and add a single descriptive H1 to the page template.
- ▸🔴 Fix WooCommerce category template to output H1; add meta descriptions via Yoast or Rank Math to all collection pages.
- ▸🔴 Evaluate hosting tier, enable full-page caching with WP Rocket, and add Cloudflare CDN to address 1,919ms TTFB.
- ▸🔴 301 redirect /product/garden-accessories/garden-tools or update the homepage banner link — fix today.
- ▸🟠 Add contact info, delivery/returns link, privacy/T&Cs, and Mailchimp newsletter field to the footer.
- ▸🟠 Embed Trustpilot summary widget on homepage and add payment method icons to footer and product pages.
- ▸🟠 Build a dedicated "Garden Centre South London" landing page with genuine copy, Maps embed, and local schema.
- ▸🟡 Audit and update all 43 missing image alt tags; set a standard alt text template for future product uploads.
Next steps
A focused three-month engagement covering technical SEO foundations, performance, and CRO trust signals would address every critical and high-priority finding and position the site to compete for "garden centre South London" before the spring season.
- Fix the 404 and homepage H1 this week — both are under an hour's work and have immediate crawl impact.
- Commission a hosting and caching audit to identify whether a platform migration is needed to resolve TTFB.
- Scope a WooCommerce template engagement to standardise H1 output, meta descriptions, and footer trust signals across the site.