Client: Prisaca Bârnova, a family apiary from Bârnova, Iași · Website: prisacabarnova.ro · Services: UI/UX design, WordPress & WooCommerce development, performance, SEO · Live since: September 2026
Prisaca Bârnova has been producing raw honey and natural bee products for more than four generations. Its online shop is a real sales channel: 383 products in 64 categories and a customer rating of 4.95 out of 5 from 178 product reviews. We redesigned and rebuilt the shop from the ground up, keeping everything that already worked for its customers and removing everything that slowed them down.
The challenge
The previous website had served the business for years, but it was showing its age. A heavily illustrated theme, a fixed sidebar of more than twenty categories and a large banner pushed the products below the fold, especially on phones. Every page downloaded more than 3 MB of data in over 170 requests, the product pages were hard to scan, and adding something to the cart meant reloading the page.
The goals were clear: make the shop faster and easier to use on mobile, present the products and the family story with a warmer, more premium look, and give the team tools that encourage larger orders, all without disrupting a store that takes orders every day.
What we built
Research and competitor analysis
Before designing anything, we analyzed the leading Romanian honey and bee-product shops, looking at how they present their products, structure their categories, price their packs and guide customers to checkout. This competitor analysis showed where Prisaca Bârnova could stand out (its family story, its own apiaries and its strong customer reviews) and which features shoppers already expect, and it shaped the structure of the new homepage, the product pages and the buying journey.
A product-first design
We created a new visual identity for the shop in warm honey, cream and brown tones. The homepage now opens with the “Recomandarea stupinei” (the apiary’s recommendation), a featured product the team chooses from the admin, followed by the family story, best-sellers, services, a guide to the honey-making process, frequently asked questions and real customer reviews. Products are shown in larger cards with clear prices, ratings and add-to-cart buttons.
Features that make buying easier
- Add to cart without reloading, with a confirmation message and a side cart that updates instantly.
- Free-shipping progress bar that shows how much is left until the 350 lei free-delivery threshold.
- Pack discounts on the product page, e.g. a pack of 3 for −3% or a pack of 6 for −6%, at fixed, pre-calculated prices.
- Instant product search in the header and infinite scrolling on the shop and category pages, with normal page links kept for search engines.
- Favorites for both guests and logged-in customers.
- Product specification tables (origin, contents, weight, allergens) generated from the existing product data.
- A branded 3-step checkout with trust badges, card payments through EuPlatesc and cash on delivery, and automatic recovery of the cart when a card payment is abandoned.
Built to be fast, secure and found
Behind the design we focused on performance and reliability: fewer and lighter assets, lazy-loaded images, and custom, lightweight features instead of heavy plugins. We restored complete WooCommerce product structured data (price, availability and reviews) for Google, added security headers, enforced strong passwords for customer accounts, fixed accessibility issues in third-party markup, and made sure staging copies of the shop can never be indexed by search engines.
Ready for search engines and AI answers: SEO, AEO and GEO
Search is no longer only about Google rankings. We adapted the shop for SEO (classic search engines), AEO (answer engines and voice assistants) and GEO (generative engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity), and made the adjustments needed for the products, the brand and the answers to common customer questions to be correctly indexed and understood by both search engines and AI assistants.
The results
These are page performance results, not visitor numbers. We tested the same pages of the old and new shop (homepage, shop and a product page) in a lab setting: each page was loaded three times on a simulated phone and on desktop with an empty cache, and we report the median.
| Page performance on mobile (lab test, average of 3 pages) | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Largest content visible (LCP) | 2.5 s | 1.5 s | 38% faster |
| Page weight | 3.3 MB | 1.6 MB | 52% lighter |
| Requests per page | 172 | 95 | 45% fewer |
The new shop went live at the end of September 2026, at the start of the busiest season for honey. We will update this case study with more results once a full season of data is available.
Technologies
WordPress, WooCommerce, Elementor Pro, custom plugins for cart, checkout, search and pack discounts, EuPlatesc card payments, All in One SEO with WooCommerce structured data, and WP-Optimize.
