How I Built a Custom Travel-Agency Website Using WordPress & PHP

How I Built a Custom travel agency Website Using WordPress & PHP — A Technical Breakdown

A technical, non-promotional walkthrough focused on architecture, code, and lessons learned.

Why I Chose WordPress + PHP

Before starting development I evaluated multiple approaches: SaaS builders, static sites with booking widgets, and a custom backend (Laravel/Node). I chose WordPress + PHP for these reasons:

• Full control over code and extensibility.
• Non-technical team can manage content easily.
• Large plugin ecosystem for travel-related features.
• Cost-effective hosting and fast iteration.

Project Requirements

• Custom Tour Package Management — structured fields: price, itinerary, gallery, inclusions/exclusions.
• Blog System for travel guides and SEO content.
• Lead forms (enquiry and custom requests) with server-side validation.
• Performance — image-heavy pages must remain fast.
• SEO — clean slugs, schema, sitemaps.

Stack & Architecture

Key choices I made:

• WordPress (latest stable) with a lightweight parent theme and a child theme for customisation.
• PHP 8.x, Nginx, FastCGI caching, and Cloudflare CDN.
• Plugins used selectively: ACF, Yoast SEO, WP Super Cache, Smush. I avoided plugin sprawl.

Custom Post Type: tour_packages

I created a Custom Post Type to manage tour packages. Here is the snippet I used in functions.php:

function create_tour_package_cpt() {
    $labels = array(
        'name' => 'Tour Packages',
        'singular_name' => 'Tour Package'
    );
$args = array(
    'labels' => $labels,
    'public' => true,
    'menu_icon' => 'dashicons-airplane',
    'supports' => array('title','editor','thumbnail'),
    'rewrite' => array('slug' => 'package')
);

register_post_type('tour_packages', $args);

}
add_action('init','create_tour_package_cpt');

<p>This gives editors an easy UI while keeping content structured for templates and listing pages.</p>

ACF: Structured Fields

I used Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) for fields such as duration, price, itinerary (repeater), and gallery. Example output in single-tour_packages.php:

<?php if( get_field('duration') ): ?>
    <p><strong>Duration:</strong> <?php the_field('duration'); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php if( get_field('price') ): ?>
<p><strong>Starting Price:</strong> <?php the_field('price'); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>

Enquiry Form: Lightweight PHP Handler

To minimise plugin overhead, I implemented a small PHP form handler with sanitisation and wp_mail. HTML form:

<form method="POST" action="">
    <input type="text" name="name" placeholder="Your Name" required>
    <input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Your Email" required>
    <textarea name="message" required></textarea>
    <button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>

<p>PHP handler example (placed in <code>functions.php</code>):</p>
<pre><code class="language-php">function handle_enquiry_form() {
if ( isset($_POST['name']) ) {
    $name = sanitize_text_field($_POST['name']);
    $email = sanitize_email($_POST['email']);
    $message = sanitize_textarea_field($_POST['message']);

    wp_mail(
        '[e-mail]',
        'New Enquiry From Website',
        "Name: $name\nEmail: $email\nMessage: $message"
    );
}

}
add_action('init', 'handle_enquiry_form');

Performance Optimisations

Because travel pages typically contain many photos, I applied the following:

• Serve WebP when supported and fall back to JPEG/PNG.
• Lazy-load below-the-fold images.
• Use Cloudflare CDN and Nginx FastCGI caching for public pages.
• Image compression and a simple asset pipeline for CSS/JS.

Tip: balance beautiful visuals with practical file sizes. Large hero images look great but harm mobile load times.

SEO & Structured Data

I used Yoast for metadata and added JSON-LD for LocalBusiness/TravelBusiness where appropriate. Example minimal JSON-LD snippet:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "TravelAgency",
  "name": "Ruuraa Holidays",
  "url": "https://www.ruuraaholidays.com/"
}

<p>Additionally, I ensured clean slugs like <code>/package/kuala-lumpur-tour/</code>, and submitted a sitemap to Search Console.</p>

Challenges

1. Parent theme conflicts — resolved by overriding templates in the child theme.
2. ACF repeater performance — limited repeater depth and paginated long itineraries on the frontend.
3. Design vs performance — iterated homepage design to reduce render-blocking assets.

Lessons Learned

• Selective plugins + small custom PHP components keep the backend maintainable.
• Custom post types are valuable for business content—structure beats mixing everything into posts.
• Performance tuning early saves future redesign costs.

Conclusion

WordPress with targeted PHP customisations provides a flexible and maintainable platform for business websites. For a travel business, the combination of structured content (CPT + ACF), careful performance optimisations, and clear SEO practices creates a workhorse site that editors can manage without developer intervention.

If you are building something similar and want code examples or help with a specific problem (ACF setup, caching, templates), drop a comment or question below.

Author: Developer / Site Builder — Technical walkthrough only. This article is intended to share implementation details and lessons, not to promote services.