Modernizing World Jewish Travel with WordPress Multisite and WP Engine

World Jewish Travel is a directory for Jewish travelers, featuring travel guides, kosher restaurants, synagogues, and other Jewish heritage sites around the world.

The platform ran on an old version of WordPress and outdated PHP. The architecture was poorly designed: the server was constantly overloaded, and each new feature placed additional strain on both the website and the server, reducing performance.

The client wanted to scale the platform, reduce the website's resource consumption, and optimize loading speed. The outdated tech stack made both scaling and performance optimization difficult.

As a result, the entire technical foundation needed to be updated: hosting, PHP version, theme, plugins, and outdated architecture.

The platform could not scale across multiple languages and regions while maintaining unified content. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the website would freeze or crash completely during any update, making every change a risk to the directory's availability.

There were three reasons for this:

Up-to-Date Content Without Loss. Outdated materials were removed, while everything that remained had to be migrated in full.

Consistent Translations. Related content and its translations had to be synchronized across all three websites without discrepancies.

Migration to WP Engine and PHP 8. We migrated the website to WP Engine managed WordPress hosting, upgraded PHP, and removed outdated and unnecessary plugins and irrelevant content.

WordPress Multisite for Three Websites. Multisite brought three websites together into a single WordPress installation with centralized management of the core, themes, and plugins. Each website in the network retains its own separate content, and WordPress does not provide built-in synchronization between websites, so we developed custom scripts to synchronize content and translations.

Content Storage in Google Cloud. We helped migrate content storage from an outdated Laravel-based system to Google Cloud. The AI Content Generator runs on the new post storage system.

AI Assistant and AI Content Generator. The AI assistant creates personalized travel itineraries. Users can save their itineraries and generate audio and video podcasts based on them. The AI Content Generator creates content for the platform itself.

User Registration and Subscriptions. We added user registration and a subscription system.

Redesign and New Brand Website. We completed a full redesign using a new theme aligned with the client's brand identity and launched a new branded website, holylandtravel.ai.

The two most challenging tasks were synchronizing content and translations across three websites without data loss and migrating post storage from a Laravel-based system to Google Cloud without website downtime.

The complexity of the first task lay in the Multisite model itself. Each website in the network stores content in its own database tables, so content and its translations created on one website do not appear on the others until they are transferred.

The complexity of the second task was the zero-downtime requirement: the website had to remain accessible while the post storage system used by the AI Content Generator was being changed.

• Multisite Synchronization Scripts. Transfer content and translations between websites in the network where WordPress lacks a built-in mechanism.

• AI Content Generator Integration with Google Cloud. The generator works with the new post storage system that replaced the Laravel-based solution.

Platform:

• WordPress, WordPress Multisite

• PHP 8, MySQL, React

Infrastructure:

• WP Engine – hosting

• Google Cloud – content storage

• Cloudinary – media

Localization:

• Multilingual and translation synchronization plugins

AI:

• Veo 3 – video generation

• Wondercraft – audio generation

Migrated from:

• Old hosting and an outdated PHP version; a Laravel-based post storage system.

• Ready for Multiple Languages and Regions. Content and translations are synchronized across the three websites in the network using custom scripts.

• Updated Technical Foundation. The platform runs on WP Engine managed WordPress hosting with upgraded PHP and without outdated or unnecessary plugins.

• AI on the New Storage System. The AI Content Generator works with Google Cloud storage instead of the outdated Laravel-based system.

• Personalized Itineraries. Users can save itineraries created by the AI assistant and generate audio and video podcasts based on them.

• Registration and Subscriptions. Users can register and subscribe.

• New Brand Website. holylandtravel.ai features a new design aligned with the client's brand identity.

• Grade B, Performance 83%, Structure 88%.

• LCP 926 ms – the largest visible content element was rendered in less than one second during the test.

• TBT 236 ms – the total blocking time of long tasks on the browser's main thread during the test.

• CLS 0 – no layout shifts counted by the CLS metric were recorded during the test.

Lighthouse and GTmetrix test under different conditions, so their Performance scores should not be compared directly.