Background
Jill Beth Travel (JBT) is a boutique, high-touch luxury travel advisory business, specializing in luxury cruise vacations through preferred supplier relationships with AmaWaterways and Windstar, luxury hotel bookings through the Virtuoso network, and Tahiti as a specialty destination.
The existing website had been built on a legacy stack: the Genesis framework with the Studio Press Authority Pro theme, paired with a heavy page builder setup. This combination had become slow and difficult to work with, and it was actively getting in the way of the kind of clean, immersive, full-bleed design the client wanted for a premium travel brand. The goal was a full rebuild: a website that felt as polished and considered as the trips JBT sells, while also converting visitors into inquiries.
To guide the rebuild, Jill and John provided a detailed developer specification document, along with a set of reference websites reflecting the look and feel they wanted, including Kristen Nix Travel, Fora Travel, Black Tomato, Ourisman Travel, and The Luxury Traveller.
The Brief
The client-supplied specification laid out a thorough set of requirements, including:
- Positioning: Present JBT as a premium luxury cruise and luxury hotel specialist
- Design direction: An immersive, visually compelling homepage built around a full-screen image carousel, generous white space, and a sophisticated but approachable tone, with mobile-first design as a priority since most luxury travel research happens on mobile
- Brand consistency: Work within JBT’s existing brand kit (colors, typography, and logo), with no rebranding in scope
- Conversion funnel: Every relevant page needed to funnel inquiries into JBT’s Tern booking form, with a consistent CTA hierarchy across the header, hero sections, and individual service pages
- Site structure: A defined set of core pages, Home, Groups, Cruises, Luxury Hotels, Tahiti, About, FAQs, and Contact, each following one of a small number of reusable page templates
- SEO and AEO: Full on-page SEO across all pages, question-based H1s for AI Overview optimization, structured data (schema markup) for the business, FAQs, and services, and a fully preserved URL structure with 301 redirects to protect existing SEO equity
- Performance targets: Core Web Vitals within Google’s recommended thresholds and a PageSpeed target of 90+ on both mobile and desktop
- Platform decision: A deliberate move away from Genesis and Authority Pro, and toward GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks, chosen specifically for being lightweight, block-native, and free of the performance bloat associated with page builders like Elementor or Divi
This was a well-documented, high-detail brief, effectively a full developer handoff document rather than a loose set of notes, which meant the build could be scoped and executed with a clear, shared understanding of what “done” looked like.
The Build
The site was rebuilt using only GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks, with custom code added where needed to achieve the specific design touches called for in the brief, rather than relying on additional plugins or a page builder to fill the gaps.
This approach directly served the brief’s core technical goals: a genuinely lightweight, fast, block-native site that could hit strong performance numbers without the overhead that came with the old Genesis and Authority Pro setup.
Results
- Plugin count reduced from 41 down to just 4. The original site was carrying an extraordinary amount of plugin bloat; the rebuild pared this down to a lean, purposeful set of just four plugins.
- A fast, modern, conversion-focused website, built to align with the client’s brand and reference sites, while funnelling visitors toward inquiries rather than just presenting information.
- A structurally sound foundation, built entirely on GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks, well suited to the SEO, AEO, and performance goals laid out in the original specification.
Going from 41 plugins to 4 is a dramatic illustration of just how bloated the old build had become, and how much of that weight could be eliminated once the site was rebuilt on a cleaner, block-native foundation.
