Bookly Connect Review & Production Audit — 2026-04-05

Overview

Kimberly Gehrmann (client-side technical lead) joined Mark Hope and Melissa Cusumano to review the Bookly integration path forward. The meeting pivoted quickly: Kimberly had conducted a comprehensive production audit and surfaced critical foundational failures — a broken WooCommerce-Square sync, underperforming SEO, and significant cart/UX regressions — that predated and superseded any Bookly work. The group agreed to pause all Bookly development until the production site is stabilized.

Meeting recording: Fathom

Attendees

Key Decisions

• Bookly development paused. No further work on Bookly or any staging variants until production foundational issues are resolved.
• WooCommerce-Square sync must be diagnosed and fixed before any additional integration work is scoped.
• SEO metadata and schema on product/service pages to be reviewed and corrected by Asymmetric.
• Cart UX and styling (sidecar, quantity updates, checkout page) to be addressed as part of the production remediation pass.

Issues Surfaced

1. WooCommerce-Square Sync Failure

Severity: Critical

The native WooCommerce-Square sync plugin is enabled but not functioning. Kimberly's investigation of the WordPress sync logs revealed:

• ~3,000 logged sync attempts where start time and end time are identical — indicating the sync process fires but completes instantly without actually transferring data.
• All WooCommerce products appear to have been manually entered, evidenced by naming inconsistencies between Square and WooCommerce product records.
• No inventory is flowing between systems. Square and WooCommerce are effectively operating as two independent, manually-maintained data stores.

"The timestamp of every single one of those logs, the start and the end time of that action is exactly the same." — Kimberly Gehrmann

Impact: Staff must update products in two places. Inventory counts diverge. Any future sync work (including Bookly) is built on a broken foundation.

Note on history: A previous Zapier-based integration (set up by a prior team member) was removed because it was corrupting Square data. The current native plugin was the replacement — but it has never been verified as functional.

2. SEO Underperformance

Severity: High

Kimberly tested search rankings from an incognito browser in Stoughton, WI for key service terms (e.g., "Aqua Gold facial," "Diamond Glow facial"). Observed ranking order:

1. Competitor med spa results (3 ahead of La Marie)
2. La Marie Beauty homepage
3. La Marie Beauty Square booking link for the service
4. La Marie Beauty product/service page (the intended target)

The Yoast SEO plugin is installed and connected to Google Analytics and Search Console, but:

• Target keywords are not set on individual product and service pages.
• Local business schema (location references: Madison, Wisconsin) exists only on the homepage — not on service pages.
• Meta descriptions exist on some pages but lack location signals and target keywords.

Mark noted that overall site health score improved from 21 → 99, crawl counts are up 278%, and broken links are at zero. These technical health gains are real, but do not address on-page keyword and schema optimization.

Resolution path: Asymmetric to review and populate Yoast SEO fields (focus keywords, location schema) on all product and service pages. Mark to send Kimberly screenshots from Google Search Console as evidence of current performance.

3. Cart UX & Performance Issues

Severity: High

Speed / Add-to-Cart Delay

• Consistent 6–7 second delays when adding products to the cart on production.
• 1–3 second lag on WooCommerce pagination scroll.
• Hypothesis: WP Rocket lazy loading configuration is interfering with WooCommerce AJAX interactions. Mark confirmed this is a known tradeoff and can be tuned page-by-page.

Cart Quantity Updates

• Changing quantity in the cart does not update the displayed price without a full page refresh.
• The "Proceed to Checkout" button will use the old quantity if the user doesn't refresh first.
• This is a standard WooCommerce setting (cart auto-recalculation) that should be enabled.

Unstyled Cart Elements

• The cart sidecar (slide-out cart) is not styled to match the rest of the site.
• The /cart page and checkout page also have unstyled elements (e.g., the close/X button).
• Kimberly noted this may have been deferred intentionally while Bookly work was in progress, but it is now a production issue.

Broken Team Page Links

• On the "Our Team" page, each staff member tile has a "Book Now" button.
• All buttons currently link to the generic Square booking homepage rather than the individual provider's booking page.
• This is a straightforward link update once individual provider Square URLs are confirmed.

Server / Performance Context

• Cache hit ratio: 56% (target: >70%)
• Root cause: High bot traffic (Amazon bots and others) hammering the site and bypassing cache.
• Planned remediation: Implement Cloudflare bot blocker rules; configure a cron job to flush cache automatically multiple times per day.

Action Items

Background & Context

This project originated as a discounted engagement — La Marie Beauty received a reduced rate on the site rebuild due to SEO underperformance on a prior Asymmetric project (Lisa's med spa in Milwaukee). The SEO issues surfaced in this audit echo the original problem that prompted the discount, which adds urgency to resolution.

Kimberly joined the project after the initial build was complete and acknowledged she should have conducted a production audit earlier. The issues she surfaced are independent of any delays caused by the client team being slow to provide content or assets.

Related

• ^[1] — La Marie Beauty client overview
• ^[2] — WooCommerce-Square sync investigation (to be created)
• ^[3] — WP Rocket lazy loading and WooCommerce AJAX conflicts