Built by Corey See the live rebuild ↗

Proposal · prepared for Beckside Books · 19 May 2026

A few specific fixes for becksidebookspenrith.co.uk.

Beckside Books · Penrith · website rebuild

I rebuild small-business sites in my spare time when I can see they are leaving conversions on the table. Three things stood out on mobile when I opened becksidebookspenrith.co.uk over coffee on Tuesday. Three findings below, then a working rebuild you can click through.

Open live preview  ↗ Read the three findings Reply to the proposal
31 St Andrew’s View · Penrith · since 2007

Two floors of secondhand and antiquarian books in a Grade II listed building on the edge of St Andrew’s churchyard. Open the live preview ↗

Three findings, observed on the live site

What the live site is leaving on the table.

Walked through becksidebookspenrith.co.uk on a phone, then on a laptop, on 19 May 2026.

01

A 159 KB WordPress + Divi homepage where 18,000 books sit behind a slow load.

Observation
Live becksidebookspenrith.co.uk is a Divi-built WordPress page that ships 159 KB of HTML before the first image, with the full Poppins font family inlined as @font-face source URLs at the top of the document (nine weights, italic and roman). The hero banner is a single un-compressed JPEG. On a 3G phone, the page paints late, the shop name has not appeared on screen, and the visitor decides whether to walk to St Andrew’s View before they have seen the front door.
After rebuild
After rebuild: a static Astro page on Vercel’s edge. Sub-100 ms first byte across the UK. The Penrith shop name and the St Andrew’s churchyard photo appear in the first paint, on a 3G connection, every time.
02

No BookStore or LocalBusiness schema, so Google cannot see the 18,000-book stock or the Wednesday lunch break.

Observation
A crawl of the live site surfaces no schema.org markup at all. No BookStore, no LocalBusiness, no openingHours, no postalAddress. The Wednesday closure between 13:00 and 14:00 is real and lives only at the bottom of /contact in body text. The 4.5 stars on TripAdvisor and the active Yelp listing from March 2025 are not surfaced. Google’s answer panel for "secondhand bookshop Penrith" goes to AbeBooks and Hay-on-Wye dealers instead.
After rebuild
After rebuild: BookStore + LocalBusiness JSON-LD at build time with the full postal address, 01768 895951 in E.164, opening hours including the Wednesday lunch break, aggregateRating tied to TripAdvisor 4.5 / 8, and a FAQPage block on the homepage. The Penrith bookshop becomes visible to the Cumbria long-tail it should already own.
03

Four real specialisms (Cumbria + Wainwright, mountaineering, Lake Poets, fiction snug) all hidden behind a single /stock page in body copy.

Observation
The stock page describes four genuinely distinct strengths in long-form prose: Mountaineering & Adventure Sports ("70+ climbing guides, signed and scarce first editions"); the Lake Poets ("Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, Lamb in formats from paperbacks to fine bindings"); a dedicated Ruskin selection; and a large archaeology run including the CWAAS Transactions back-run. None of those land on the homepage. A visitor looking for a Wainwright first edition or the Alpine Journal back-issues that the shop genuinely holds has no idea by scanning the homepage.
After rebuild
After rebuild: a four-card homepage grid. Cumbria + Lake District + Wainwright. Mountaineering + Alpine. Lake Poets + Ruskin. Fiction snug + Folio Society + Virago. Each card opens to a category page with editorial copy and the AbeBooks deep-link for that subject. The shop’s strengths become its homepage, not a footnote in /stock.

Pricing

Fixed price. No hourly billing. No upgrade tier.

£2,000
Fixed for the rebuild. One-off. Includes the Astro static rebuild, BookStore + LocalBusiness + FAQPage schema, four category landing pages, and the homepage hero, heritage and visit blocks.
£150
Per month for hosting on Vercel and ongoing care: content updates, schema upkeep, monthly analytics email, the AbeBooks deep-links kept current.
£50
Optional. An embedded chatbot trained on the FAQ and the four category pages, for the "do you have a copy of X" enquiries that come in out of hours.

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

Next step

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 north-west independent builds this quarter, and the first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 29 May 2026, the proposal site comes down.

See the rebuild ↗
A working preview you can click through.
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