Why We Did This
Freemasonry Matters has been running for years, and over that time — like any long-lived website — it accumulated what developers politely call “technical debt.” In plain English: things had got a bit creaky behind the scenes. Pages were slow to load, search engines weren’t finding our best content, security needed tightening, and the site wasn’t as accessible as it should have been.
So we rolled up our sleeves and gave the entire site a thorough overhaul. Not a redesign — the site still looks and feels the same — but a deep, structural rebuild of everything underneath. Think of it as rewiring a lodge building: the outside hasn’t changed, but every cable, pipe, and fitting behind the walls is now modern, safe, and fit for purpose.
Here’s what we did, and why it matters to you.
Finding Us Just Got Easier
The single biggest change is to how search engines see our content. Before this work, almost none of our 4,000+ articles had the metadata that Google relies on to understand and rank pages. Now:
- 4,219 posts have proper focus keywords
- 4,201 posts have unique meta descriptions — up from roughly 15
- 4,915 images now have alt text, making the site far more accessible to readers using screen readers
- Every article now carries structured data (Article schema) that makes us eligible for Google’s rich results — those enhanced listings with images, dates, and author information
We also cleaned house. We removed 7 dead pages from our sitemap, fixed duplicate URLs, tidied up 71 orphaned tags and 6 junk categories, and corrected 28 author display names that were showing email addresses instead of proper names. Over 400 truly empty posts were removed entirely, and around 2,400 very short posts have been marked so that search engines focus on our substantive content instead.
There’s also a brand-new About page — something we should have had from the start.
A Faster, More Secure Site
We removed six unused plugins, including Jetpack (which alone was 69MB), freeing up around 115MB of dead weight. The plugin count dropped from 27 to 21. We added font preloading so text appears faster, optimised our caching layers, and stripped out a legacy Google Analytics integration that had been deprecated for over two years.
On the security front, we blocked REST API user enumeration, completely disabled XML-RPC (a common attack vector), and added a full suite of modern security headers including Content Security Policy and Permissions-Policy. These are invisible changes, but they make the site significantly harder to attack.
Ready for the Age of AI Search
Whether you love or loathe AI, the reality is that tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are increasingly how people discover information online. We’ve taken steps to make sure Freemasonry Matters is properly represented:
- We created an llms.txt file — a structured guide specifically for AI crawlers
- We added explicit rules in our robots.txt for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot
- Low-quality archive pages have been marked to prevent AI systems from citing thin content as representative of the site
When someone asks an AI assistant about Freemasonry in the UK, we want it drawing from our best work — not from a tag page with two sentences on it.
Your Turn: Community Publishing Is Here
This is the change we’re most excited about. Freemasonry Matters is now open for community contributions.
We’ve built and launched the FM Community Publishing system. Any reader can now register an account and submit their own articles directly through the site. The submission form includes a full rich-text editor, image uploads, and auto-save so you won’t lose your work.
Every submission goes through a moderation queue — we review everything before it goes live — so the quality bar stays high. Once you’ve submitted, you can track the status of your articles from your personal community dashboard.
We’d love to hear from lodge secretaries, Masonic historians, charity coordinators, and anyone with a story to tell. Whether it’s a lodge spotlight, a piece of research, a charity event write-up, or a reflection on what the Craft means to you — this is your platform.
New Content Already Live
Alongside the technical work, we’ve published over 20 new articles. These include the new Tyler’s Corner series, a deep dive into UGLE governance, lodge spotlights from around the country, and features on Masonic charitable work. Every new article has a proper featured image, full SEO metadata, and structured data from day one.
What’s Next
This overhaul gives us a solid foundation to build on. Over the coming months, we’ll be working on improving our Generative Engine Optimisation score (currently 51/100), expanding our content partnerships, and making the community publishing experience even smoother.
If you spot anything that doesn’t look right, or if you have suggestions for the site, we’d genuinely like to hear from you. And if you’ve been thinking about writing something — now’s the time. Head to the community dashboard and get started.
The site is faster, more secure, more accessible, and — most importantly — more yours. Here’s to the next chapter.
Related reading: How to Submit Your Own Article to Freemasonry Matters · Scotland's Grand Lodge Axed Social Media — Were They Right?