Website Performance Review — 2026-04-05

Overview

Review meeting with Kimberly Gehrmann (La Marie Beauty liaison) to walk through completed backend optimizations, clarify the WooCommerce-Square sync behavior, and surface SEO opportunities. Asymmetric's engagement with La Marie is a technical maintenance contract only — not a marketing retainer.

Attendees:
- Mark Hope (Asymmetric)
- Melissa Cusumano (Asymmetric)
- Kimberly Gehrmann (La Marie Beauty, external)

Recording: Fathom

Key Decisions

• Scope confirmed: Asymmetric is engaged for technical maintenance, not marketing. Content strategy, SEO campaigns, ads, and blog development would require a separate marketing retainer.
• WooCommerce-Square sync is working as designed: It syncs inventory/quantity for existing products. New products added in Square still require manual page creation in WooCommerce — this is a platform limitation, not a bug.
• "View cart" quantity update is broken and has been flagged as an open action item for Asymmetric to investigate.

Backend Optimizations Completed

Mark Hope performed extensive backend work resolving stability and performance issues:

Caching

• Resolved conflicts between CDN-level, server-level, and plugin-level caches that were overlapping and causing errors.

Plugin Conflicts

• Identified and disabled old plugins incompatible with the current WordPress version.
• Removed a security headers plugin that was generating excessive database queries and causing intermittent 500/502 errors.
• Replaced it with a streamlined must-use plugin that applies security headers without the query overhead.

Results

Remaining health issues are minor (e.g., missing alt text on decorative icons) and do not affect functionality.

Additional Work

• Reviewed and corrected Google Tag Manager configuration (tags, firing rules, relevance).
• Audited robots.txt and Cloudflare bot-blocking rules; configured AI crawler access appropriately (training bots blocked, answer bots allowed).
• Updated team member pages (Katie and Nadia excluded — no Square profile links available).
• Adjusted WooCommerce cart font to better match site design; full button customization is not possible within WooCommerce constraints.

WooCommerce-Square Sync

Clarification provided to Kimberly:

• The sync is functioning correctly for inventory and quantity updates on existing products.
• Cron jobs use a "ping" pattern — they check for changes and log only when something has changed. Identical start/end timestamps in logs indicate no changes were detected, not a failure.
• Limitation: New products created in Square do not automatically generate WooCommerce product pages. Manual page creation in WooCommerce is required for any new product.

Open bug: The "view cart" quantity update field is not working. Asymmetric to investigate and fix.

SEO Snapshot

Data pulled from Asymmetric's paid SEO tooling (not a dashboard available to La Marie directly).

• Top-10 Google rankings: 32 keywords (down from 50 in June due to Google algorithm changes)
• Organic traffic: ~229 visits/month (~8 visits/day)
• Domain authority: Low; backlink profile is weak

High-Value Local Keywords

These keywords are commercial, local, and low-difficulty — meaning new optimized content could realistically reach top-10 rankings within ~60 days.

Opportunity Summary

• Content clusters: Building blog content around high-intent local keywords (e.g., "Madison Botox," "Lip Flip Madison") would capture more of the available search volume. Currently, thin content means the site captures only a fraction of searches even for keywords where it already ranks.
• Backlinks: Increasing domain authority via quality backlinks would improve ranking potential across all keywords.
• Ads: Keyword data could directly inform a paid search campaign targeting the same local terms.

⚠️ Executing on any of this requires a marketing retainer. Asymmetric shared this analysis as context, not as in-scope deliverables.

Action Items

Transcript Excerpts

On scope clarification:

"There would be [monthly marketing meetings] if they were a marketing client, but they're not. So right now, they just hired us to work on the website and we did that." — Mark Hope

On WooCommerce-Square sync:

"It should be syncing quantity, but again, new page, new product, new page." — Melissa Cusumano

On SEO opportunity:

"Lip Filler Madison, Wisconsin — it's relatively low volume, but the keyword difficulty is nothing. You can be on the top page of Google in 60 days." — Mark Hope

On content thinness:

"If you're in position one and you're getting 16 out of 40 searches, why aren't we getting the rest of those 40 searches? It's because our content's really thin. We got one page. What we really want is a content cluster around that." — Mark Hope

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