Irish Ride — Dublin Transfers
A premium taxi and private-transfer booking platform for Ireland — custom WordPress theme, real-time fare calculation, Stripe payments, Twilio SMS. No page builder, no SEO plugin, no framework. Everything hand-built.
What does Irish Ride do?
Irish Ride is a premium taxi and private-transfer service in Ireland. Riders book journeys or day trips, pay with Stripe, get SMS confirmations, and the driver dispatch runs through a bespoke admin interface. Every part of the platform is custom — no bloated booking plugin, no page builder, no Yoast. The theme itself handles routing, fare calculation, driver management, payments, notifications, and SEO.
Why build a booking platform from scratch?
Existing WordPress taxi-booking plugins either force a pre-made theme, ship megabytes of jQuery, or lock the fare model into their own rate tables. None fit the operational reality: dynamic fares by distance and time of day, per-vehicle pricing, driver availability windows, Ireland-specific pickup zones, and a Stripe checkout that had to feel closer to Booking.com than to a generic contact form.
A custom theme was the right answer — one dependency, one performance budget, one place to reason about the business logic. LiteSpeed Cache handles the caching layer; everything else is deliberate PHP.
How was the platform put together?
Real-time fare engine
Haversine-based distance calculation between pickup and drop-off, layered with time-of-day multipliers and per-vehicle rate cards. Fares update as the user drags the map pins — no round-trip to a third-party fare API.
Stripe Payment Intents
Full Payment Intents flow with 3D Secure, saved payment methods, and idempotency keys. Every booking gets a Stripe reference stored against the WordPress order record so refunds and receipts flow through Stripe's dashboard.
Twilio + Mailgun notifications
SMS confirmations to riders and drivers via Twilio, HTML email receipts via Mailgun. Both wrapped in a single notification service so the driver-app rebuild later can reuse the same interface.
Leaflet + OpenStreetMap
Map rendering with Leaflet.js and OpenStreetMap tiles — no Google Maps API key, no per-request cost, no vendor lock. The pickup and drop-off UI feels native to the page rather than an iframe drop-in.
Day Trips product line
Fixed-price full-day itineraries (Cliffs of Moher, Wicklow Mountains, Northern Ireland loops) rendered as a custom post type with its own booking flow. Same fare engine, different pricing model.
Manual SEO layer
Custom inc/seo.php handles titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, Schema.org markup, and Open Graph — no Yoast, no RankMath, no plugin overhead. IndexNow protocol wired for near-instant Bing indexation.
Live homepage
Screenshot of the live production site.
Vehicles & atmosphere
Stylised placeholders in the site palette — real vehicle photography lands as soon as the client’s photographer completes the fleet shoot.
How is Irish Ride performing?
The site launched publicly in April 2026 and grew through the summer. Google Search Console tracks the climb clearly: from a zero-click baseline in mid-May to 25 clicks in the seven-day window ending on 2026-07-03. Impressions moved from 269 to 2,970 in the same window — an eleven-fold jump — with the average position holding around 15 as content clusters ship.
Booking flow works end-to-end (Stripe, SMS, receipts, driver dispatch). GA4 tracks 27–36 users per month, which reads small in absolute terms and healthy for a service business three months from launch. The next lever is content depth on route pages and long-tail queries like blueway map ireland that already register in Bing.