, Sunderland
● Built by Corey · 18 May 2026
Current site  ↗ Open live preview  ↗
★ Sunderland city centre · Fawcett Street since 2018 · family-run by Wendy Mulvaney

A few specific fixes for wendysplace.co.uk.

Proposal prepared for Wendy's Place, the family-run cafe and bistro at 58 Fawcett Street, Sunderland, opened in 2018 and run by Wendy Mulvaney herself. Three findings below, then a working rebuild you can click through at /preview/.

Open live preview  ↗ Read the three findings Reply to the proposal
Address · 58 Fawcett Street, Sunderland SR1 1SE Opened · Fawcett Street, 2018 Ownership · Wendy Mulvaney, sole trader
58 Fawcett Street · Sunderland · since 2018

Family-run cafe and bistro. Traditional North-East home-cooked food, by Wendy Mulvaney. Open the live preview ↗

Snapshot, 18 May 2026

What ten minutes on the live site looked like.

I opened wendysplace.co.uk on a phone, on a slow connection, the way most first-time visitors arrive. Three things stood out before the kettle boiled. None of them require a change of menu, only a rebuild of the website around facts that are already true.

Web stack and gaps inventory, 18 May 2026
Current ↗ wendysplace.co.uk
Platform
Duda (SystemID US_DIRECT_PRODUCTION, plan 423)
Hosting
Duda shared, with conversiobot.com chatbot widget loading on every page
Hero
370 by 370 pixel Facebook-archive JPEG served as an og:image at 1920w (pixelates on retina)
Schema
Restaurant JSON-LD present, but wrong address (57 not 58) and wrong hours (10:30 to 16:30)
Reviews
4.7 stars from 73 TripAdvisor reviews, ranked first of fifteen dessert spots, not surfaced anywhere
Social cards
twitter:card set to summary (small thumbnail), not summary_large_image
About story
Wendy Mulvaney named as owner on TripAdvisor responses, never on the site itself
Proposed
Framework
Astro static site (Astro 6), keeps the Flipdish ordering link intact
Hosting
Vercel edge, sub-100ms first-byte across the UK, no chatbot script tax
Hero
"Family-run cafe and bistro, Fawcett Street since 2018", with the homemade-pie counter as the lead image
Schema
LocalBusiness + Restaurant + AggregateRating + FAQPage, regenerated from one source on every build
Reviews
4.7 stars from 73 reviews surfaced above the fold, plus a green-heart quote pulled from Wendy on TripAdvisor
Social cards
summary_large_image card, 1200x630 hero, og:image hosted at wendysplace.co.uk
About story
A heritage block that names Wendy Mulvaney, the 2018 opening on Fawcett Street, and the home-cooked plate

Three findings, in order of priority

What Wendy's Place is currently leaving on the table.

A walk-through of the live wendysplace.co.uk on 18 May 2026. Every finding is verifiable by visiting the live site, and every fix is built in the linked /preview/.

01

Wendy's structured-data address is 57 Fawcett Street, the actual address is 58, and the JSON-LD hours show 10:30 to 16:30 while the real hours are 10:00 to 15:00.

Observation
The current site is built on Duda. The Restaurant JSON-LD block in the homepage source says streetAddress 57 Fawcett Street; the contact page, the gallery, the Sunderland City Council food-hygiene listing and Google Maps all say 58 Fawcett Street. The same JSON-LD block declares openingHours of 10:30 to 16:30 Monday to Saturday; the contact page lists 10:00 to 15:00 Tuesday through Friday and Sunday, 10:00 to 15:30 Saturday, closed Monday. Both errors are in the structured data that Google reads first.
Impact
Google trusts JSON-LD over visible HTML when the two disagree. The number-58 photos on Instagram and the 57 in the search snippet are how Sunderland customers end up at the wrong door. The 10:30 opening time means anyone arriving for breakfast at 10:00 (the time the door actually opens) sees the cafe shut on Search and walks past.
After rebuild
Restaurant + LocalBusiness schema regenerated from a single source. streetAddress fixed to 58 Fawcett Street, openingHoursSpecification matched to the real seven-day pattern including the Monday closed and the 11:45am breakfast last-orders, telephone in E.164 (+441915653922) so it dials cleanly from a mobile, and a FAQPage block for the questions Wendy answers on TripAdvisor every week.
02

The TripAdvisor rating of 4.7 from 73 reviews, ranked number one of fifteen dessert spots in Sunderland, does not appear anywhere on the site or in the structured data.

Observation
TripAdvisor lists Wendy's Place at 4.7 stars from 73 reviews, currently ranked first of fifteen dessert spots in Sunderland. The TripAdvisor reviews go back to 2018, with Wendy responding personally to almost every one of them, signing with a green-heart emoji that matches the script logo. None of that rating is on the homepage, the menu page, the contact page, or in the structured-data block. The page that does mention rave reviews mentions them in flat prose with no numbers.
Impact
Cake-and-tea customers in Sunderland city centre choose between Wendy's, the Bridges food court, Heavenly Desserts, and the chain coffee shops. The deciding factor on a Saturday afternoon is almost always the star rating in Search. Without AggregateRating schema, Google does not display gold stars next to wendysplace.co.uk in the SERP, and the rating that took eight years to earn is invisible at the moment of decision.
After rebuild
AggregateRating schema added to the LocalBusiness block, surfacing the live 4.7 / 73 figure (kept in sync with TripAdvisor by a once-a-month script). A four-line trust strip beneath the hero showing the rating, the count, the dessert-rank, and a representative quote pulled from Wendy's own TripAdvisor replies. Wendy's review responses, including the green-heart sign-off, kept as a small inline element in the heritage block.
03

The Twitter Card meta is set to summary, not summary_large_image, and the og:image is a 370-pixel-wide Facebook archive photo from 2018.

Observation
When the wendysplace.co.uk homepage URL is pasted into iMessage or WhatsApp or Slack, the unfurl preview shows a small thumbnail next to the title and description, not a wide hero card. The og:image points at a Facebook-archived JPEG (29683710_1632096266838339_n) that is 370 by 370 pixels at native resolution. The Duda CDN serves it at -1920w but the underlying image still only has 370 pixels of resolution to draw with, so the link preview pixelates on a retina iPhone.
Impact
Every time a regular shares a TripAdvisor review or a Sunday-lunch photo with a sister or a colleague over WhatsApp, the link preview is a small fuzzy thumbnail of a 2018 storefront photo. Sharing is the cheapest acquisition channel a city-centre cafe has. A wide, sharp link card is the difference between a forwarded message that gets clicked and one that gets scrolled past.
After rebuild
twitter:card switched to summary_large_image. og:image replaced with a freshly captured high-resolution photo of the Fawcett Street counter, hosted at the rebuilt site and served at 1200 by 630 pixels (the size every social unfurler reads first). og:title and og:description rewritten so the unfurl card teases the homemade pie and the Sunderland city-centre address.
Pricing

Fixed price. No retainer. No contract.

One fixed fee for the rebuild plus an optional monthly care plan. Fully remote, from Switzerland.

Build

Full Astro rebuild + correct schema + sharp social cards

New homepage anchored on the family-run-since-2018 credential. Address and hours fixed in JSON-LD and visible HTML. AggregateRating schema from TripAdvisor refreshed monthly. summary_large_image cards. FAQPage block for the questions Wendy answers in TripAdvisor every week. Two-week to three-week turnaround.

Includes one round of revisions. DNS cutover. 30 days of post-launch tweaks. Source code on day 60.

£2,000
fixed · one-off
Care

Hosting and ongoing care

Vercel hosting, SSL renewal (automatic, forever), monthly content updates, schema and rating refresh, a monthly analytics email so you can see what gets clicked.

£150
/ month · cancel any time
Optional

Embedded FAQ chatbot

Trained on the FAQs (parking, hours, kids menu, Sunday lunch, dietary). Replaces the ConversioBot widget with a leaner first-party chat that does not tax the Lighthouse score.

£50
/ month · optional

No retainer. No contract. No in-person visits required, fully remote from Switzerland. Happy to visit Fawcett Street for sign-off and photography if it helps, never a condition.

Timeline · phased rollout

Three weeks. Each week ships something usable.

Week 1

Fix the data layer

  • ● LocalBusiness + Restaurant + AggregateRating + FAQPage schema, regenerated from one source
  • ● Address corrected to 58 Fawcett Street everywhere, hours matched to the seven-day pattern
  • ● twitter:card switched to summary_large_image, og:image hosted at the new domain at 1200x630
Week 2

Tell the story, lift the photos

  • ● Hero rebuilt around "Family-run cafe and bistro, Fawcett Street since 2018"
  • ● Wendy Mulvaney named as owner in the heritage block, with a real owner-quote pulled from a TripAdvisor reply
  • ● 4.7 / 73 trust strip beneath the hero, with the dessert-spot number-one rank from TripAdvisor
Week 3

Launch and care

  • ● DNS cutover from Duda to Vercel, Flipdish ordering link kept intact
  • ● Lighthouse audit on mobile, all images recompressed to mozjpeg q=78, hero under 240KB
  • ● Sunday-lunch booking widget and an embeddable cake-of-the-week panel for Instagram cross-post
FAQ

Four questions a Fawcett Street counter is likely to ask.

If any answer needs a follow-up call, reply with two or three 20-minute slots in the next ten days.

What happens to the Flipdish online ordering link the menu page points at? +

Flipdish stays. The rebuild treats Flipdish as the cart and order-routing back-end and links into it from the new menu page. Customer accounts, current open orders, the Flipdish dashboard and the kitchen-printer integration are all unaffected. The only change is the page they click through from goes from a Duda template to an Astro page that loads cleanly under a second on mobile and uses your real photography.

The site has a small ConversioBot widget that handles repeat questions. Does that come across? +

Only if you want it. The widget loads a ~50KB JavaScript bundle on every page, which is the single biggest contributor to the current mobile Lighthouse Performance score. If the conversations it handles are useful (parking, hours, dietary, are you open Mondays), I can replace it with a leaner first-party chat trained on your own FAQ for an optional £50 a month. If it has not added bookings or covers, dropping it is the fastest single Lighthouse improvement.

The 4.7 TripAdvisor rating updates over time. Will the rebuild show a stale number? +

No. A small once-a-day script reads the TripAdvisor public rating and rewrites the AggregateRating JSON-LD block at build. If the rating drops to 4.6 or the count climbs to 80, the homepage updates the next morning. No manual edits, no risk of an old number sitting on the site for a year.

The current site mixes a Facebook-archive shopfront photo with a stock Unsplash image in the JSON-LD. Do we need to commission a photographer? +

Not strictly. The Wendy's gallery already has nine usable photos at decent resolutions (the homemade pie close, the cake counter, the Saturday spread, the kitchen-pass plate, the two-floor interior with the staircase). The rebuild uses those for the hero, the heritage block and the menu page. If you want a fresh hero photograph for the og:image card, a half-day photographer in Sunderland is around £200 and I can recommend two locals.

Next step · one email, one decision

Two or three 20-minute slots in the next ten days.

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-East builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 28 May 2026, the proposal site comes down.

See the live rebuild

A working preview you can click through.

The Wendy's hero, the family-run-since-2018 heritage block, the homemade pie counter, the 4.7 / 73 trust strip, and a sharp summary_large_image social card as a working 2026 site. Opens in this tab.

Open /preview/  ↗