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. Sub-100ms response at 100,000 listings. Categories, geo radius, price level, rating, amenities 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. Email verification for guests, draft auto-save, conditional fields per listing type (restaurant gets cuisine + price + hours, attraction gets ticket info, event gets date range).
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 + written reviews. Pro adds multi-criteria reviews (food / service / ambiance / value for restaurants, location / staff / cleanliness for hotels) plus photo reviews.
6-layer anti-spam. Honeypot, rate limits, reCAPTCHA / Turnstile, Akismet, keyword blacklist, URL density cap. All on by default. 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, prime carousel rotation, verified badge, 100 credits
- Sponsored - 90 days, home + search top slot, 200 credits
Vendors buy credit packs (e.g. 250 credits for $99), pick a plan, listing activates. Hold-and-Commit means the credits hold during submission and only commit when the listing goes live. Failed submissions return the hold.
Seven payment adapters ship in Pro: Stripe direct, PayPal direct, WooCommerce, WooCommerce Subscriptions, MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, WooMemberships. One credit ledger across all of them.
Setup time
30 minutes from a fresh WordPress install:
- Install Listora free + run the setup wizard
wp listora demo seed --pack=placesloads 128+ realistic city-guide listings to test the surface- 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.