What you are building
A city guide that locals + tourists actually open before they go out. Restaurants, hotels, attractions, events, services - all under your domain, all searchable by neighborhood, price band, rating, and amenities. Locals claim their own businesses. You run the directory + charge for featured visibility.
Think Time Out, but on WordPress, on your domain, with no SaaS bill.
Why most city guides fail
The local-media business has been broken by the same three problems for a decade:
- Free Yelp pulls every search query away from your domain
- TripAdvisor owns every review your visitors leave
- Google ranks Google Maps over the publisher who wrote about the place
A city guide that ships on WordPress with proper faceted search, business claims, and reviews flips that. You own the queries. You own the reviews. You own the audience. The business owners come to you because their listing converts.
What Listora delivers out of the box
Faceted search at scale. Search reads a dedicated index table, with a geo bounding box and Haversine distance for radius search, instead of stacking meta_query JOINs. Categories, geo radius, price, rating and features all stack as facets. URL state preserves so a visitor can share or refresh a search.
Frontend submission wizard. Locals submit their business through a guided, mobile-first form. Submitters sign in or register first, drafts auto-save, and fields change per listing type (restaurant gets cuisine, price and hours, a place gets admission fee and best time to visit, an event gets dates and tickets).
Self-service claims. Every unclaimed listing shows a Claim this business button. Owner uploads proof, admin approves, ownership transfers cleanly. No duplicate listings, no manual merges.
Reviews + multi-criteria ratings. Visitors leave 1-5 star ratings and written reviews, and each listing type can have its own rating criteria (for example food, service, ambiance and value for restaurants). Pro adds ready-made criteria sets, a ratings breakdown chart and photo reviews.
Layered anti-spam. Honeypot, rate limits, keyword blacklist and URL density cap run by default. reCAPTCHA / Turnstile and Akismet join in once you add keys or the plugin. Most bot listings never reach moderation.
How you charge for it
Pro adds credit-based pricing plans. Define plans like:
- Basic - 30 days, standard placement, 50 credits
- Featured - 60 days, marked Featured so it sorts ahead of standard listings, 100 credits
- Sponsored - 90 days, Featured with a “Sponsored” badge, 200 credits
Vendors buy credit packs (e.g. 250 credits for $99), pick a plan, listing activates. Hold-and-Commit reserves the credits and deducts them only once the plan activates. If activation fails, the hold is cancelled.
Pro has seven ways to take payment: Stripe and PayPal built in, plus five plugin adapters (WooCommerce, WooCommerce Subscriptions, WooCommerce Memberships, MemberPress and Paid Memberships Pro). One credit ledger across all of them.
Setup time
30 minutes from a fresh WordPress install:
- Install Listora free and run the five-step setup wizard
wp listora demo seed --pack=place,restaurant,hotelloads realistic city-guide listings to test the surface (--pack=allloads about 128 across nine packs)- Open vendor submissions, add your first paid plans, configure Stripe or WooCommerce
By the end of week 1 you have a city guide that ranks for “best coffee in [neighborhood]” - on your domain, with reviews you own.