Timber Creek Distillery

Timber Creek Distillery: A Custom WordPress and WooCommerce Rebuild for Florida’s Most Awarded Distillery

Client: Timber Creek Distillery
Industry: Craft Spirits, Hospitality and Ecommerce
Timeline: Launched spring 2025
Services: Custom WordPress Development, WooCommerce, Event Ticketing, Performance Optimization, Technical SEO, Analytics

The Challenge

Timber Creek Distillery is a family-owned, grain-to-glass distillery founded in 2014 on 240 acres outside Crestview, Florida, about 45 minutes from the Emerald Coast beaches. It bills itself as Florida’s most awarded distillery, with gold medals for its vodka, rum, and whiskey and a lineup that includes gin and an American single malt, all distilled on site from North Florida grain. The business runs on two engines: spirits sold online and in the tasting room, and experiences on the property, from distillery tours and bourbon blending sessions to wine and chocolate tastings and Pizza Saturdays.

The previous website was built on a commercial theme with a drag-and-drop page builder and a standard WooCommerce store. It could sell a bottle, but it was not built for the experience side of the business: events had no proper ticketing, the visual design did not match the quality of the product, and the builder made every content change slower than it should have been. For a destination business where a visitor decides on a phone whether to make the drive, the site needed to load fast, look the part, and sell both bottles and bookings.

The Approach

• A custom WordPress theme replaced the page builder. Templates for spirits, experiences, private labels, and the shop were built in code around the distillery’s actual content, with the photography given room to carry the brand.
• WooCommerce for bottles, event ticketing for experiences. The store was rebuilt on WooCommerce with event ticketing and a calendar integrated so tours, tastings, and special events sell through the same checkout as the spirits, with capacity and dates managed by the distillery’s own team.
• Filtering and discovery built in. Faceted search and filtering let visitors sort spirits and experiences without leaving the page, one of the features that would normally require a heavier builder stack.
• Performance and SEO handled at the theme level: page caching, lean markup, structured headings, and location and product architecture written for how people actually search for a distillery to visit or a Florida-made spirit to buy.
• Analytics set up to measure the business, not just traffic: purchase and key event tracking in Google Analytics 4 so the distillery can see which channels sell bottles and fill events.

The Results

Comparing the nine months after launch (July 2025 through March 2026) with the same nine months a year earlier in Google Analytics, total sessions grew from about 14,000 to about 39,300, an increase of roughly 181%. Organic social sessions nearly doubled, from 4,155 to 7,805, as the new site gave the distillery’s Facebook and Instagram audience somewhere worth clicking through to. Organic search traffic held steady and remained the site’s most engaged channel, with a 69% engagement rate and an average of a minute and a half per session. Paid social and search campaigns, which did not exist before the rebuild, added a further layer of visitors on top of the organic growth.

Beyond the numbers, the distillery now runs bottle sales, tour bookings, and event tickets from one WordPress site it can update itself, on a foundation that matches the quality of what is in the glass.

Key Takeaways

Destination businesses sell two things. A distillery, winery, or venue site has to sell the product and the visit. Building ticketing into the same store as the shop turns the website into the front desk.

Replace the builder, keep the team in control. Custom templates with structured fields let a small team publish events and products quickly without a page builder in the way.

Measure what pays. Analytics configured around purchases and bookings, rather than page views, shows a small business exactly which channels are worth its money.