Astro + Cloudflare Site Migration | Redesign Travel Wishists

Following my previous decision to move away from WordPress, I fully migrated my affiliate site to a modern stack: Astro + Cloudflare.

This site has been running for nearly two years as a simple blog-style content library. However, due to inconsistent updates, its overall performance and traffic metrics were poor. It also became increasingly difficult to maintain and iterate on content long-term.

During the migration, I explored Astro’s capabilities and realized it is far more suitable for structured content, lightweight database integration, and fast frontend data fetching. Instead of keeping the old long-form blog structure categorized only by cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu, I decided to completely rethink the user experience.

Traditional travel content is fragmented and inefficient. When planning trips, users spend massive amounts of time researching authentic local experiences, verifying opening hours, checking reservation rules, and adjusting schedules to fit their travel window and budget. The existing long-form articles do not solve this pain point well.

Therefore, I redesigned the site to focus purely on local, authentic experiences. Users can directly browse categorized local activities such as public baths, spas, temple visits, and other unique regional experiences, with clear and accessible information without messy content noise.

While iterating the first version, I also researched competitors. Most mainstream travel platforms focus on paid auto-generated itineraries, mostly in app-only formats. This approach is unnecessary for short-term travelers staying in China for just a week or two, and most travelers are unwilling to rely on rigid, paid itinerary plans.

Based on user journey habits, I redesigned my core functionality. Instead of traditional newsletter subscriptions — which have low value and low willingness to subscribe — I built a custom experience collection feature.

Users can bookmark their favorite local experiences, temporarily save the customized travel list on the site, and have the whole curated schedule sent to their email. All customized travel wishlists are hosted on travelwishlists.com. They can revisit the site later, share the plan with travel partners, or use it for future trips.

This solves the email marketing problem naturally without forced subscriptions, forming a complete user closed loop for the travel wishlist platform.