All work / Case study
Destination.chat
A travel price-comparison site in five languages (flights, hotels, car hire, tours, eSIM), earning solely from affiliate commissions. The owner had built it himself on Carrd: five separate one-page sites, one per language, each at its own address. He wanted WordPress so he could edit the content himself, with one condition: clicks on affiliate links had to be tracked. We moved it to a single WordPress install with our own theme and no page builder. Later, at his request, the languages moved from separate subdomains to subfolders of the same domain, with a redirect for every old address.
Measurable results
The "before" is the client's site on Carrd, as it was live. Accessibility was measured with Google PageSpeed Insights on 23/08/2026, three runs per language, on the live Carrd site and on the new site on our own server, at a temporary address before the domain moved. Links were measured in the page code: rel="sponsored" on the old site on 21/08/2026 with the page's JavaScript running, on the new site on 23/08/2026 in the HTML. The Booking button addresses were compared position by position on 22/08/2026 and the new buttons were checked one by one on 10/09/2026. We do not present a performance score: the live site has not yet been measured with the raw data saved, as was done for the Carrd site.
What we did
Results
- 01Not a single commission-earning link was lost: 212 affiliate link positions (78 unique URLs) moved position by position, with the same button text and every parameter intact. Each language kept its own links, expedia.de on the German page, tripadvisor.fr on the French one. The text was carried over word for word across 5 languages and 95 sections, with zero words lost
- 02One install instead of five. The client asked whether he needed multisite (one WordPress hosting several sites) or five separate installs. The answer: one install with the free Polylang (a multilingual plugin), each language at its own address, no subscription. Our own theme, with one stylesheet, fonts served locally and no page builder. The 19 sections of the Carrd site were reproduced one by one and compared with the original in a real browser, on mobile and desktop
- 03The owner edits text, buttons, links and the background photo himself. Any photo he uploads automatically gets three sizes and a WebP copy. Every page also has a "Page appearance" box: title size, column width, and its own background photo that carries over to the translations
- 04The rel="sponsored" attribute (the marker that tells Google a link is paid) was added with JavaScript after page load, from a hand-written list of names, and covered 128 of the 212 positions. Now it sits inside the HTML, on every affiliate link, with no list: 212 of 212 in the measurement of 23/08/2026. The rule lives in the code, so it also covers links added later
- 05All 25 Booking buttons shared one generic partner address, with no section and no market. They became links per section (hotels, flights, cars, attractions, taxis) and per market, checked one by one on 10/09/2026: 25 of 25 open the intended page
- 06Clicks on affiliate links were not being recorded anywhere. We installed Umami (cookieless analytics, on the client's own account) with one event per click: destination, section, language. All five languages show up in one dashboard, each one separately. The cookie consent dialog is our own, one 18 KB file in 5 languages, with no third-party subscription. The privacy texts were updated in all 5 languages
- 07The move happened one language at a time, within 24 hours, with the old site kept up as the way back. The certificate for all six hostnames was issued before any DNS record changed, so that no visitor would land on a page without one. Each language passed the same checks before and after the change. The 30 hreflang entries (which page is in which language, declared to Google), titles and descriptions came through identical
- 08On 21/09/2026 the languages moved from subdomains (gr.destination.chat) to subfolders (destination.chat/el/), so that links from the client's blogs point to one domain. Every old address redirects to the new one, keeping its path and parameters. The English pages stayed where they were. The change was tested first on a copy, page by page: titles, descriptions and external links stayed the same. On the live site, 22 of 22 pages answer normally
A look inside
Straight from the live site, as it stands today. Tap an image to see it full size.
