Ara Sanat: a medical-equipment shop on WordPress, with a bespoke theme and 18 custom plugins

Selling medical and beauty equipment is not like selling ordinary goods. Customers want advice before they buy, part of the trade is on instalments, and a category page has to sell products and work as an SEO landing page at the same time — rich content, frequently asked questions and guidance, not just a grid of items.

With off-the-shelf tooling this usually ends in two problems. First the page builder: the category landing is assembled in Elementor, the page gets heavy, and every structural change depends on one person. Second plugin sprawl: one for SEO, one for the gateway, one for SMS, one for Persian localisation — and every update is a fresh risk.

WordPress and WooCommerce were kept as the platform — authentication, products, orders and payment come from them — and everything specific to Ara Sanat was written from scratch: a hand-written theme (version 3.2.6) with full right-to-left support, the locally hosted IRANSansX typeface and semantic HTML, plus 18 independent plugins.

The important decision was not to pile capabilities into the theme. Each service is its own plugin, so it can be updated, switched off or debugged on its own, and changing the theme later does not take the site down with it.

SEO in the project, not in a generic plugin. The bespoke SEO plugin provides meta titles and descriptions, canonicals, robots, Open Graph, structured data, FAQ blocks, breadcrumbs, a sitemap and redirects — exactly what a landing page needs.

Category landings without a page builder. A dedicated plugin builds a proper page for any WooCommerce category: a mix of products, rich content, FAQs and a route to advice — no Elementor and no extra weight.

Local payment and SMS. A ZarinPal gateway with HPOS and Checkout Blocks support, card-to-card and IBAN transfer with receipt upload and admin review, and SMS.ir with a send queue for order notifications and one-time codes.

Forms that are actually tracked. Consultation, contact, instalment purchase, complaints and recruitment each have their own plugin, with a tracking code and administration in the dashboard — not an email form that disappears into an inbox. Form security uses capability checks, nonces, input validation, a honeypot and safe handling of uploaded files.

Performance. Conditional asset loading, a local font, responsive images, deferred scripts, and page caching with WooCommerce exclusions so the cart and checkout are never cached.