Archived Project: WordPress Hotel Booking Website
Published on | Portfolio • E-commerce Analytics • WordPress
Following the recent retirement of my main WordPress portfolio site, I'm also officially sunsetting a second major project: my mock hotel booking website previously hosted at hotel.yunasportfolio.com.
As the free hosting for this domain comes to a close, I'm taking the opportunity to look back at what this project taught me. Through working on real-world client projects, my skills in building highly accessible, SEO-optimized, and modern web applications have grown beyond what this legacy setup can offer. Still, this hotel website was a vital stepping stone for learning how to track complex e-commerce behaviors!
Under the Hood: Booking Flows & E-commerce Tracking
Like my portfolio, this hotel site was built on the "Twenty Twenty-Five" theme and highly customized with bespoke HTML5, CSS, JS, and PHP. What made this project special was the full implementation of a booking e-commerce flow.
My main objective here was advanced tracking. I implemented custom Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) events specifically designed to map out the user journey, from viewing a room to completing a purchase. Alongside Google's tools, I integrated Hotjar and Smartlook for heatmapping and session recording to understand user friction points during the booking process.
This website was also where I heavily tested and deployed my custom consent architecture. If you're interested in how I built a privacy-first tracking setup without bogging down the site with plugins, check out the tutorial that came out of this project:
It’s always a little sad to pull down a project you put so much care into, but clearing out the old makes room for the new. I'm excited to apply everything I learned here to much more sophisticated builds in the future!