A modern, fast and secure WooCommerce store that ships live bees across New Zealand

Zonda was the first business of its kind in New Zealand, and 35 years on it’s still the market leader in bumblebee pollination and biological crop protection. Zonda is part of the NZ Gourmet group, one of New Zealand’s best-known growers, whose own glasshouses use Zonda’s bumblebees and beneficial insects. So the new store needed to sit comfortably alongside a brand Kiwis already know and trust.

Its online shop had served it well for years, but the business had outgrown it.

The shop was a bespoke system running on PHP 5.6, a version of the programming language behind most websites that stopped receiving security updates at the end of 2018. Orders needed manual handling by the small team behind them, and the system couldn’t connect to the modern services a growing store relies on.

Shipping was the real challenge. Many of Zonda’s products are perishable because they’re alive. Bumblebee colonies and predatory mites need overnight courier, they can’t be dispatched on a Friday, and they have to arrive healthy. Many of Zonda’s customers are growers on farms, orchards and lifestyle blocks, so a large share of orders head to rural delivery addresses, where courier times and costs differ. Customers needed to see the right price, and every perishable order needed to go out on the right service, every time.

Zonda also serves two very different audiences, commercial growers and home gardeners, and each needed a clear path to the information and products that matter to them.

Moved the shop onto WooCommerce. We built the new store on WooCommerce, the world’s most popular online store platform, running on WordPress. That brought modern card payments through Paystation (plus direct credit), customer accounts and simple product management for the Zonda team.

Connected NZ Post directly. The store pulls live CourierPost rates at checkout, using each product’s weight and size and the customer’s address. An address lookup at checkout means customers pick an exact NZ Post address, so the rate is right first time. Each product is marked as perishable or not, and perishable orders are routed to CourierPost’s perishable service automatically. Rural delivery got extra care: rural addresses are recognised and priced correctly, so customers in the country see a true cost at checkout rather than a surprise later. We tested every product against urban and rural addresses in both islands, and every one priced correctly.

Shipping labels printed straight from the order. Once an order is packed, the Zonda team creates the NZ Post shipping label from inside the order with one click, then prints it. The courier booking and tracking number are generated automatically, and the customer gets a tracking email straight away. There’s no separate courier website to log into and no copying addresses across.

No more double handling. Before, orders had to be handled more than once, from the shop to the courier system and again into the accounts. Now each order is entered once, by the customer, and flows from there. We built a custom integration that sends every new order straight to Zonda’s accounting system as it’s placed, so nobody types an order in a second time. For a small team, that’s hours back every week and far fewer chances for a typo to send a hive to the wrong address. Orders travel to a separate, locked-down orders address and are verified with a shared secret key, so they can’t be faked or intercepted along the way.

Built far deeper content. The new site has well over twice as much helpful content as the old one, organised around the customer. Commercial growers and home gardeners each get their own journey. There’s a dedicated page for every crop Zonda pollinates, from kiwifruit to tomatoes, covering flower biology, hive density, timing and application notes, so a grower searching for their own crop lands on a page written for them. Pest control, hive care and troubleshooting are explained step by step, with FAQs on the key pages, and the live-product guarantee, ordering terms and privacy policy were rewritten in plain English to current NZ law.

Made it secure. The store runs on a current, fully supported version of PHP and is kept up to date. It sends a full set of modern security headers (HTTPS-only, framing protection, content-type and referrer controls), and it has a carefully tuned content security policy, a browser-level rule that tells visitors’ browsers exactly which services the site is allowed to load, which blocks injected scripts. It scores 20/20 on security in our site audit.

Made it fast. We tuned the store so pages appear sooner: non-essential scripts load later, fonts load faster, and images are optimised. Measured with the same Google Lighthouse test on the old site and the new, the homepage’s speed score went from 70 to a perfect 100 on desktop, with its main content appearing four times sooner. On mobile the score rose from 67 to 91, the main content appears 2.5 times sooner, and pages no longer jump around as they load.

Optimised every page for search. Each page was written around a researched search phrase, with its own SEO title and description, and worked up to Yoast’s green rating, the benchmark for a well-optimised page. The homepage now scores a perfect 100 for SEO in Google’s Lighthouse test, up from 83.

Set it up for AI search. More people now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews instead of scrolling search results, so the site is built to be understood and quoted by them:

• An llms.txt guide, a plain-language summary of who Zonda are and what each page covers, written for AI tools, plus a full-content version they can read in one pass.
• Structured data describing the business, its contact details and opening hours, and FAQ answers marked up so search engines and AI tools can lift them directly.
• AI crawlers welcomed. The site explicitly lets the major AI assistants read it rather than blocking them.
• Answer-shaped content. Clear questions and direct answers throughout, the format AI assistants most often quote.

Got the tracking right. Google Analytics and Meta tracking are set up through Google Tag Manager, with every key shop step recorded, so Zonda can see what’s working.

Added the finishing touches. A video hero on mobile, a downloadable “How to open your Zonda bumblebee hive” guide, refreshed trade account and terms forms, and custom share images so pages look good when shared on social media.

Kept 35 years of credibility. The founding story, the Koppert partnership, Zonda’s place in the NZ Gourmet group and the NZ-made positioning all came across. The site also moved to a shorter, modern domain (zonda.co.nz). Before the switch we mapped every address on the old site, including pages, products and images, to its new home and redirected each one, so existing search rankings, bookmarks and links from other sites all kept working.

Zonda now has a store that suits the way it actually ships. Customers see accurate courier costs before they pay, perishable orders automatically go out on the right service, rural customers included. Shipping labels print straight from the order, and orders reach the accounts on their own, so there’s no more double handling.

It’s also faster, more secure and much easier to find, with far deeper content, every key page green in Yoast, and a site set up to be found by AI assistants as well as Google. In the same Google Lighthouse test, the homepage now scores a perfect 100 for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO on desktop, up from 70, 63, 92 and 83. On mobile, performance rose from 67 to 91 with accessibility, best practices and SEO all at 100. It also scores 100 in Lighthouse’s new agentic browsing check, which measures how easily AI agents can find their way around a site. The store scores 20/20 on security in our site audit, on a platform that’s fully supported for years to come.

You can see the finished site at zonda.co.nz.