Ovolo Hotels: Rebuilding Without Breaking

Ovolo Hotels is an independent boutique hotel group with properties across Asia and Australia. When I joined the project through Dijitally, their web presence was a patchwork of separate WordPress installs — one per hotel location, each with its own theme, plugin stack, and deployment process.

The Problem

Five separate sites meant five times the maintenance, five times the risk of inconsistency, and no way to run a unified brand experience across properties. SEO authority was scattered. A rebrand required touching every site independently. A security patch meant five deployments.

The ask: consolidate everything into a single platform. The hard constraint: lose no SEO in the process.

What I Did

1. Migration Architecture Without SEO Loss

Planned and executed the consolidation of all hotel location sites into a single WordPress installation. Ovolo had built years of domain authority — one wrong redirect meant losing rankings they'd never recover. Every URL was mapped, every redirect was tested and staged before touching production. No rankings were lost in the migration.

2. Full Theme Refactor to Gutenberg

Scrapped the legacy page builder theme and rebuilt the entire front-end using modern Gutenberg blocks. This gave the content team a flexible editing experience while the engineering side got clean, maintainable code with no proprietary lock-in.

3. Performance Engineering

Systematically drove PageSpeed scores above 95 across all hotel pages — image optimization, critical CSS inlining, deferred scripts, server-side caching. Consistent high scores across a multi-location site, not just the homepage.

4. The Easter Egg Layer

One of the more unusual briefs: design an in-hotel contest hidden inside the site's Google Maps integration. I built a custom overlay on top of the Maps API embedded on each hotel page — guests who explored the map could find "golden eggs" hidden at specific coordinates inside each property, with real prizes attached. Required custom JavaScript against the Maps API and coordination with the hotel operations team to define and update the hidden locations.

My Role

Tech Lead — responsible for architectural decisions, sprint planning with the project manager and CEO, code review for a junior developer, and direct delivery on the core engineering work.

Key Tech

• CMS: WordPress (custom Gutenberg blocks)
• Performance: WP Rocket, Cloudflare, image optimization pipeline
• Maps: Google Maps JavaScript API (custom overlay)
• Process: CI/CD deployment pipeline, staged environments