Modernising a Travel Media Platform with Enterprise WordPress Solutions
Like many rapidly growing media brands, One Mile at a Time (OMAAT) had outgrown its legacy tech stack. Over time, the site had become reliant on outdated architecture, limiting scalability, slowing down publishing workflows, and restricting monetisation opportunities.
To future-proof the business, OMAAT partnered with The Code Company to modernise its platform with the latest WordPress functionality. This overhaul optimised publishing capabilities, streamlined editorial workflows, and introduced new revenue opportunities beyond affiliate marketing.
The result? A high-performance, flexible publishing platform designed to support OMAAT’s continued growth and evolving business model.
The Challenge
Like many growing publishers, OMAAT was operating from a legacy website that had been iterated many times over the past decade. The site was functional yet reliant on a variety of plugins, shortcodes and metadata.
One Mile At A Time’s SEO partner, Upbuild, had identified significant Core Web Vitals issues that were affecting user experience and search rankings. The outdated frontend framework was limiting search exposure despite the quality of their content, creating a ceiling for organic traffic growth.
One Mile At A Time is an online community for travel enthusiasts to share stories and discover the best way to maximise airline rewards. Its revenue model is based on programmatic advertising and affiliate marketing with over thirty credit card partners worldwide. The site’s active comment section had become a critical part of the user experience, with loyal readers returning as much for the community discussions as for the content itself.
As the business grew, so did the complexity of technical requirements. The leadership team recognised that in order to realise their future growth ambitions, they needed to:
- Modernise website design to reflect the evolution of the OMAAT brand
- Re-structure publishing architecture
- Increase site performance (and traffic)
- Improve SEO and address Core Web Vitals issues
- Expand affiliate marketing opportunities
- Enhance community engagement features to strengthen reader loyalty
Because of the strict compliance regulations surrounding financial services products, data reliability is crucial.
So OMAAT chose The Code Company’s help to engineer a new technical solution. Here’s how we approached it…
Deep discovery and data mapping
The foundation of all successful website development projects is a thorough discovery and roadmapping process — and OMAAT’s discovery was particularly in-depth. With over a thousand custom attributes and sub-attributes to understand, The Code Company’s data specialists spent several weeks mapping out data from 180 airlines, different credit card programs, interest rates, frequent flyer points and more.
Armed with this understanding, we could determine which aspects of the brief were deliverable within the CMS, and where new solutions would need to be developed.
Designing a new complex data structure
Instead of a separate API-connected web app, we streamlined OMAAT’s CMS to minimise technical overhead.
We extended WordPress to meet OMAAT’s complex data needs, avoiding developing a separate web app with API connections. Our solution uses bidirectional synchronisation with custom database tables and abstraction layers. This lets the site query, segment and transform credit card data then surface it to WordPress for seamless integration into the publishing workflow (see below).
Advanced Credit Card Finder
One of the core project objectives was to leverage OMAAT’s large and comprehensive dataset and provide audiences with an intuitive search functionality.
The Advanced Credit Card Finder enables users to perform search queries, and receive highly-detailed information based on their unique credit card requirements.
This digital product utilises a combination of features including:
- Complex compound filtering on multiple taxonomies
- Keyword searching
- A context panel explaining exactly what users are seeing (and why)
For example, if a user searches for an American Express (AMEX) card, OMAAT’s marketplace shows all AMEX cards plus any other cards that AMEX points can be transferred to within the specified timeframe.
To enhance discoverability and audience engagement, we also performed advanced technical SEO work.
Custom integrations synchronised to multiple systems
OMAAT’s advanced search functionality was achieved using the open-source data engine Elasticsearch.
This gives the website lightning fast search functionality and a host of specialised benefits:
- Search multiple data types (structured, unstructured, geo, metric)
- Data aggregations delivering analysis at scale
- Real-time visualisation
Smarter, faster content publishing
With all their data intuitively organised, it’s far easier for editorial and marketing teams to create content and to insert contextually-relevant promotions into articles.
The custom Smart Article functionality enables users to easily drag and drop their selected credit card module directly into the article.
Additionally, audiences are seamlessly directed to a pre-filtered version of the marketplace, maintaining the context of the module that led them there.
A Native Community Engagement Platform
One of the key features of OMAAT’s digital transformation was developing a custom commenting and community system that would keep readers engaged without relying on third-party tools
The custom WordPress commenting system enables travel enthusiasts to share insights, tips, and engage with content directly on the site. All while delivering superior performance compared to SaaS alternatives.
It utilises a combination of features including:
- Native WordPress architecture without third-party SaaS needed
- Travel-themed gamification with status levels mimicking airline tiers (e.g. Diamond Level)
- Custom moderation tools for maintaining quality discussions
- Responsive design optimised for both desktop and mobile engagement
For example, when users contribute valuable content, they earn “miles” that advance their community status — encouraging deeper engagement while speaking the language of OMAAT’s travel-focused audience.
The Results
The WordPress modernisation delivered impressive performance improvements across all key Core Web Vitals metrics:
- 58% faster content loading with Largest Contentful Paint dropping from 2.8s to just 1.17s
- 96% reduction in layout shifts (CLS from 0.0643 to 0.0026), creating a significantly more stable user experience
- 58% decrease in JavaScript blocking time (from 1262ms to 536ms), dramatically improving interactivity
These substantial improvements not only enhance user experience but directly support SEO performance and conversion rates, with pages loading faster and responding more quickly to user interactions.
