Directory and marketplace websites
A directory is not a website with a lot of pages on it. It is software — and the things that decide whether it works are the ones that only start to bite once there are a few thousand listings in it.
Talk about your projectWhat a directory has to get right
Almost every directory that fails does so for one of these four reasons, and all four are decided at build time.
Speed that survives scale
A directory that is quick with two hundred listings and unusable with twenty thousand was built on the wrong foundation. How listings are stored, indexed and cached is the whole game, and it is very expensive to change later.
Search people can actually use
Filters have to match how someone looks — category, location, distance, open now, whatever your category demands — and results have to come back instantly, or people stop filtering and leave.
Submission you can moderate
Open submissions attract spam from the first week. A queue, clear rules and tools to approve or reject in bulk are the difference between a growing directory and an abandoned one.
A reason for listings to exist in search
Thousands of near-identical pages are a liability unless each carries something genuinely its own. How listing pages are structured decides whether they are an asset or dead weight.
What we build for directories
The listing model
Fields, categories and relationships designed for your category rather than bent out of a generic template.
Search and filtering
Fast filtering across category, location and attributes, built to stay fast as the count grows.
Submission and moderation
Self-service submission, a review queue, and bulk tools so moderation does not become somebody's full-time job.
Claiming and owner accounts
Owners claiming and maintaining their own listing, which keeps data current without your team touching it.
Revenue, where there is a model
Featured placement, paid tiers, subscriptions or lead fees — built in from the start rather than retrofitted.
Structure that can rank
Listing and category pages built so search engines can index them meaningfully instead of reading them as duplicates.
Questions
Can you build on an existing directory plugin?
Sometimes, and where one genuinely fits we will say so rather than build from scratch for the sake of it. But most off-the-shelf options slow down badly at scale, and that limit is worth knowing before you are living inside it.
How many listings can it handle?
Tens of thousands is a normal target and the architecture should assume it from day one. The cost of designing for scale up front is small; the cost of retrofitting it is not.
How do we stop spam submissions?
A moderation queue, sensible validation and rate limiting handle most of it. Complete automation is not realistic — the goal is making review fast rather than eliminating it.
Can listing owners edit their own entries?
Yes, through claiming and an owner account. It is also the only approach that keeps a large directory accurate over time.
How long does a build take?
Four to eight weeks depending on the listing model, the search requirements and whether payments are involved. This is the longest build on this list, and it is the one where rushing costs the most.
Tell us what you need it to do
Describe the business and what the site is failing to do now. We will tell you what it would take.
See the other industries we build for, or where we work.