Travelopia Finds Editorial Speed with Enterprise WordPress

With a portfolio that spans 26 award-winning brands and 150+ global destinations, Travelopia provides unique, custom-designed travel experiences. Each year, the company serves over half a million guests embarking on bespoke vacations of their dreams, from polar expeditions to wildlife safaris.  

Many adventures start with a blog or a photo story. And every story has a content editor behind it. Looking for an easier content production experience and more robust website performance, Travelopia decided to migrate a dozen sites to Pantheon. Within half a year on the platform, results followed.

A year ago, the marketing team was concerned about our websites’ underlying technology, but that’s no longer the case. The blame game is gone now, which helps everyone work together to focus on what’s important, like improving business scalability."

- Sree Balakrishnan, Technology Director – Innovation and Products at Travelopia

Seeking an Enterprise Solution to Improve Efficiency and Website Performance 

The company’s Drupal 7 platform was built on an old engineering stack, and though, at the time, it was a great one-size-fits-all solution, the developer team’s priorities were changing. With about 100+ marketers continually adding content to their brand sites, the dev team needed to keep up with approximately 100 content updates per day.

Balakrishnan discovered the right-fit solution in WordPress: a content-friendly CMS that allowed their marketers to self-publish confidently and quickly. WordPress developer talent was an added bonus.

“The number of developers who can work with WordPress is much larger than Drupal,” Balakrishnan said. “So, adopting WordPress was not just for marketing reasons but also for developer and partner availability. Plus, it also has 20 years of content publishing history.”  

The need for editorial speed and efficiency converged with another marker that had captured Balakrishnan’s attention. “I like to build high-performance websites, and my measure of success is a great Google Core Web Vital Score — it’s a sign of healthy engineering,” he said. But none of his efforts to improve WordPress caching, which he knew would help him achieve the scores he sought, were successful. That's until the company began using Pantheon's WebOps tools.  

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Dramatic Improvements in Core Web Vitals  

The 30-person development team uses WordPress Blocks (aka Gutenberg), a WordPress way to assemble web pages a lot more quickly than any other page templating system the company used before. Balakrishnan observed that “the Content Blocks were a big reason we decided WordPress was the platform for us.”

Pantheon’s Advanced Global CDN (AGCDN) proved to be the solution Travelopia needed for quicker page loads worldwide and better user experiences. The development team can easily manage edge customizations for groups of websites with geolocation control, rate limiting, domain masking and personalization at scale. Web Application Firewall (WAF) helps Travelopia prioritize website security. 

“Pantheon’s integration with AGCDN, along with well-implemented WordPress caching, dramatically improved our Google Core Web Vital Scores."

– Sree Balakrishnan, Technology Director – Innovation and Products at Travelopia

No More Blame Game

Pantheon’s modern workflows support deeper collaboration between Travelopia’s web and marketing teams. Enabled by the high-performant technical platform that automatically scales for traffic spikes, marketers can confidently work their content, SEO and pay-per-click magic to drive lead generation and conversion. 

The platform’s WebOps tools like Multidev help the developer team support marketing with greater efficiency.  From faster releases to the ability to spin up and multiply parallel pre-production environments, the team can quickly respond to feature requests without deployment getting blocked elsewhere.     

Pantheon understands the lifecycle of WordPress development, so we don’t have to think about the infrastructure. I don’t have to worry about CDN optimization or any last-minute things like security because Pantheon handles it all.

– Sree Balakrishnan, Technology Director – Innovation and Products at Travelopia