WordPress and garden centre
A garden centre on WordPress, where the archive is the problem
Most trades can index everything they have ever published and come to no harm. A garden centre cannot. Advice to plant something is correct for a few weeks and wrong for the rest of the year, and WordPress is built to keep every post that has ever been written, at a permanent address, indefinitely. The install is easy here. Deciding what the crawl is allowed to read is the work.
Why this pairing is its own job
The WordPress install guide covers the tag, and the garden centre guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- Seasonal advice on a garden centre site is published as posts. Each one keeps its address for good, the archive links to all of them, and nothing in the rendered text of a four year old bulb planting post says it was written for a different October.
- The question set turns over completely four times a year, so the corpus that answered well in March is answering the wrong questions by July, without anything having gone wrong.
- Workshops and events usually come from a calendar plugin, and its event pages commonly stop being published once the date passes. Material vanishes from the corpus on a schedule nobody set, which is the opposite failure to the archive and happens on the same site.
- The toxicity line makes the archive genuinely risky rather than merely untidy. An old care sheet post that describes a plant without mentioning that it is dangerous to cats is precisely the page a weak match will reach for when somebody asks whether it is safe.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the WordPress guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a garden centre site specifically.
Give the crawl a list of paths rather than the whole site
The default instinct is to point it at the front page and let it follow everything. On this platform that means the archive, the category listings, the tag listings and every post since the site was built, most of which describe a season that is not happening.
Decide instead which parts of the site are advice you stand behind today. Usually that is a small set: the care pages, the current season page, the guarantee, the delivery terms and the visiting information. Everything else can stay published for readers without being material the assistant answers from.
This is also the cheapest control you have over the safety line. The pages you deliberately include are pages somebody has read recently. The archive is not.
Rewrite one page per season instead of publishing a post per season
A post is an entry in a permanent record. A page is a document you edit. This trade needs the second, because the correct answer to when should I plant this changes and the old answer should stop existing rather than sit alongside the new one.
One page called what to do this month, rewritten as the season turns, gives the assistant a single current source and gives you one thing to update. The old versions are gone rather than competing, which is the entire point.
Write the month into the sentences, not only into the heading. An answer that says plant these in October carries its own timing when somebody reads it in a chat panel with no page around it.
Keep the care sheets undated and grouped
Watering, feeding, aspect, hardiness, eventual size and pruning window, written by plant group rather than by variety, do not go out of date the way a planting calendar does. Those belong as pages, indexed permanently, and they carry most of the volume.
Where a group contains anything known to be harmful to pets or children, say so in the care sheet itself rather than leaving it to a separate safety page. A retrieval pass that lands on the care sheet should find the warning attached to it, not in a document it did not reach.
Where the answerable material lives
| One current season page, rewritten in place | What is worth doing this month and what you have in at that point, edited as the season turns rather than published again. The month appears in the sentences so the answer carries its own timing. |
|---|---|
| Care sheets by plant group, as pages | Watering, feeding, soil, aspect, hardiness, eventual size and pruning window. Undated by nature, so these are the safest thing on the site to index permanently. |
| The plant guarantee, with its exclusions | How long it runs, what proof you want, and the honest exclusions around planting conditions, drought and neglect. Argued about at the till precisely because the headline and the detail differ. |
| Delivery terms for bulk and living goods | Area, charge, minimum order for compost and aggregate, whether the driver goes beyond the kerb, and what happens to plants in a heatwave or a frost. A living delivery is a different promise from a parcel. |
The first thing to get right
Move the seasonal advice out of posts and into one page you rewrite, then exclude the post archive from the crawl.
It removes the only failure on this site that produces confidently wrong advice rather than merely unhelpful answers. Everything else here is a matter of coverage. This one tells a customer to do something in November that will not work until March, and they will blame the plant.
The failure that belongs to this combination
Two planting posts, three years apart, both perfectly readable
Somebody asks when to plant garlic. The corpus contains a post from three autumns ago and a post from last autumn, both accurate on the day they were written, both quietly assuming the reader is standing in the month they were published in.
The assistant answers from whichever matches the wording better, cites it, and the citation makes it look verified. Nothing in the reply signals that the source has a date on it, because the sentence that was quoted does not mention one.
This is why the fix is a content change rather than a setting. An excluded archive cannot be quoted, and a single page with the month written into its sentences cannot be quoted out of season.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a garden centre visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- Can we not just index everything and let it work out what is current?
- No. It answers from the material it was given, and two posts describing different months are both true statements about gardening. Nothing in the text tells it which one the person asking is living in. The distinction has to exist in what you index, not in what it infers.
- What happens to our workshop and event pages?
- They tend to disappear when the date passes, because the calendar stops publishing them. That is usually correct behaviour, but it means the assistant loses that material silently. If you want the workshop programme answerable, keep a standing page describing what you run and when in the year, separate from the individual dated events.
- Is the pet safety question really something we have to design around?
- Yes, and it is the reason to be strict about the archive. The person asking has usually already found their cat chewing something, and the worst outcome is a reassuring paragraph pulled from an old care sheet. Put the warning inside the care sheets themselves and let the refusal carry the vet route.
Keep reading
- Installing on WordPressHook the tag into wp_footer with a snippet plugin, keep it out of the theme, and stop optimisation plugins from deferring it away.
- Everything for a garden centreSeasonality drives every question a garden centre gets. Plant care answers well, toxicity and site suitability need a person.
- A gym on WordPress, where the timetable is a container and the terms are a fileThe timetable block is filled in the browser, so a crawl of it reads an empty box. The notice period is in a PDF. Both decide what a gym assistant can say.
- Writing that is correct for a fortnight and published for yearsDeadline and threshold posts stay live at permanent addresses. In this trade an old figure quoted with a citation reads as advice, not as a stale tip.
- Ten years of seasonal advice, all of it still liveTen years of dated advice posts are still live, the consent banner holds the script back, and April ends up answering a November question.
- A garden centre whose questions are mostly not about the shopHours, dogs, the cafe and the compost delivery area are the real questions, and none of them live in the shop. Where to put them instead.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.