Case study
Engineering excellence & performance breakthroughs
A successful site redesign and seamless migration to Altis Cloud means we’re able to celebrate significant user experience upgrades and an instant 25% increase in Lighthouse performance.
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1. About RecipeTin Eats
Founded in 2014 by Nagi Maehashi, RecipeTin Eats is one of the largest independent digital recipe publishers in the world.
With monthly website traffic accounting for almost 45 million page views, a strong track record of growth, an exceptionally engaged readership, and a 5.7 million-strong social media following, RecipeTin Eats is known for its high quality recipes, excellent photography and easy-to-follow tutorial videos.
Proudly sharing recipes that can be made by those short on time, tight on budgets, and with everyday ingredients, RecipeTin Eats is a firm fan-favourite.
2. Creating a trust-based partnership
The RecipeTin Eats team had had mixed experiences with development agencies in the past, so we knew we had work to do in building a solid foundation of trust and transparency. We addressed this through proactive communication, consistent delivery, and collaborative efforts.
Beginning our work together with a retainer that included bug fixing and maintenance tasks, the partnership gradually expanded to refactoring code and identifying improvement opportunities.
The engagement grew as our teams worked well together, eventually encompassing significant projects such as the design implementation for the homepage, category pages, recent cookbook landing pages, and a migration to Altis, all underpinned by a transparent and collaborative partnership throughout.
3. Engineering excellence in action
We established robust development processes, setting benchmarks for future projects.
By introducing visual regression testing with Cypress and Percy, we ensured proactive quality assurance and reduced manual testing efforts. Our efforts to align workflows with Scrum practices led to streamlined operations.
Additionally, we implemented Tailwind CSS to facilitate a more flexible and functional page architecture. The development of custom Gutenberg blocks further empowered RecipeTin Eats with an improved and more effective editing experience.
Next, the homepage and category pages were rebuilt with a new, improved architecture, and a new cookbook page was launched, leveraging this flexible architecture.
Throughout, site stability and performance were prioritised, with regular plugin upgrades to maintain optimal functionality.
4. Performance boost following RecipeTin Eats’ migration to Altis Cloud
Seeking improved reliability, scalability, and security, along with a consolidation of services, the RecipeTin Eats team made the decision to migrate their platform to Human Made’s enterprise cloud hosting solution, Altis Cloud.
The migration couldn’t have been smoother, and contributed to a huge 25% increase in Lighthouse-reported performance from day one.
To ensure this smooth migration process, we enabled efficient parallel deployments to the previous host and Altis environments.
Our growth journey had reached a point where reliable delivery of quality engineering truly built for scale was an essential requirement to support our continued business growth. Human Made have fit this part of the puzzle like a glove.
It’s no overstatement to say the relationship has been transformative for our business. I feel entirely confident about the future knowing that whatever we choose to do from here, we have the expertise, the capability, and the rapport with the Human Made team to get it done. That’s liberating.”
Goh Maehashi, Technical Manager, RecipeTin Eats
5. Increased user engagement, traffic and performance
The results of the project speak for themselves, and we’re thrilled to have helped RecipeTin Eats reach and expand their audience.
While many factors play a role in traffic increases, our improvements contributed to the impressive 50%+ increase in new and returning visitors RecipeTin Eats saw following the project.
Clicks from Google Search surged by 160% over 16 months, indicating significantly improved organic reach and visibility.
A recent peak of 25,000 active users highlights notable user base growth, with a remarkable increase of 10,000 users in just one week.
Consistent Lighthouse audits ensure ongoing performance monitoring and optimisation, maintaining high standards for user engagement and site performance.
6. What the numbers tell us
The data suggests a positive impact on RecipeTin Eats’ website performance and user engagement. User engagement has increased, in line with the homepage redesign and implementation of user-focused features, as well as a recent cookbook launch.
Additionally, technical improvements contributed to faster page load times and better Core Web Vitals, potentially leading to higher conversions.
Through working hand-in-hand with the RecipeTin Eats team from kickoff to launch, we were able to deliver a significantly improved publisher and user experience.
Human Made’s collaborative approach fostered trust and enabled the implementation of robust processes and architectural improvements.
The successful Altis Cloud migration and subsequent performance optimisations, along with strategic design enhancements and ongoing maintenance, mean RecipeTin Eats’ growing audience benefits from a highly performative site that delivers a great user experience every visit – a great platform for future success.
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