Unlocking growth and performance for RecipeTin Eats
RecipeTin Eats has become one of the world’s most popular recipe sites, with 5.7 million social media followers and 45 million monthly page views. As the site’s traffic grew, Altis Cloud stepped in to support the performance and scalability it really needed.
RecipeTin Eats is one of the world’s most loved recipe sites, enjoying massive success and ranking in the top ten most trafficked food sites. Founded in 2014 by Nagi Maehashi, RecipeTin Eats’ 5.7 million social media followers can’t get enough of the delicious recipes on offer, and the blog quickly became a household name. (And we’re big fans here at Altis too!)
But every pro has a con: RecipeTin Eats’ popularity soared, and their website was starting to buckle under the pressure of 45 million monthly page views. Altis Cloud offered the solution.
Finding a host that can keep up
Initially, RecipeTin Eats’ site was self-hosted, then transitioned to WordPress VIP, where they remained for two years. While VIP provided a stepping stone for RecipeTin Eats’ growth, it soon became clear that it could not keep pace with the site’s burgeoning demands. Several critical issues surfaced:
Single point of failure
RecipeTin Eats’ global reach meant that availability across the world was paramount. Their existing CDN was experiencing instability from other customers (a “noisy neighbor” problem), resulting in an unacceptable loss of traffic in their European regions.
Unmanaged bot traffic
An inability to limit bot scraping led to frequent site downtime, often at the same time every day. While it wasn’t desirable to block all bots, the absence of rate limiting allowed excessive bot traffic to strain the system, taking the site offline. For an enterprise site like RecipeTin Eats, managing bot traffic is crucial, and this lack of control was a significant drawback.
Disconnected support
The site’s hosting and development partner were spread across different time zones, leading to delayed response times and a disjointed support experience. Moreover, the account managers lacked in-depth WordPress knowledge, leaving RecipeTin Eats feeling disconnected and frustrated with the level of support provided.
Scalability and costs
As RecipeTin Eats grew, their page views continued to skyrocket, yet their existing solution wasn’t equipped to scale in a cost-effective way. Staying on their existing course would have led to sharply rising costs, an unsustainable scenario for a high-traffic site managed by a two-person web team.
Altis Cloud: Flexibility, control & efficiency
Recognising these challenges, RecipeTin Eats turned to Altis Cloud for a solution that could offer more flexibility, control, and efficiency. Our proposal centered on delivering Altis’ comprehensive, all-in-one solution built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This provided RecipeTin Eats with a robust and scalable infrastructure that could handle high traffic volumes while ensuring reliability and security. Altis Cloud’s global presence, with servers in seven regions worldwide, meant that RecipeTin Eats could benefit from localized server support, significantly improving back-office performance and website responsiveness.
Altis worked with RecipeTin Eats’ development partner, Human Made, to seamlessly migrate the site.
Seamless integration and immediate performance improvements
The results speak for themselves. Despite expectations of around 10% improvement, in the first six months of partnering with Altis, RecipeTin Eats saw their page views increase by more than 50%: a remarkable achievement that underscored the scalability and performance enhancements of the Altis platform. Our ability to limit bot traffic effectively prevented the site downtimes that had plagued them previously, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted user experience.
Key performance metrics improvements
Altis Cloud’s impact on RecipeTin Eats’ Core Web Vitals (CWV) was equally impressive, demonstrating tangible improvements in key performance metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Reduced from 1.6 seconds to 1.1 seconds
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): Improved from 1.6 seconds to 1 second
- First Input Delay (FID): Lowered from 151ms to 119ms
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Maintained at an optimal level
- Time to First Byte (TTFB): Consistently at 0.3 seconds
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Held steady at 0
These improvements not only enhanced the user experience but also contributed to better search engine rankings and higher engagement rates – most importantly, they delivered Nagi’s delicious food to even more people, even faster! 😋
A partnership based on shared values
What truly sets apart the partnership between Altis Cloud and RecipeTin Eats is the alignment of our cultural values.
Both organizations are committed to keeping people at the heart of what we do, ensuring that user-centricity guides every decision.
Our cultural and values-based alignment meant this was the perfect partnership from the get-go: we both want to keep people at the heart of what we do, which resulted in a user-centric, highly effective collaboration throughout.”
Jon Ang, Director of Sales, Altis Cloud
Our relationship with RecipeTin Eats is personal and deeply collaborative. We are on a first-name basis with the client, providing a bespoke service that goes beyond the typical vendor-client relationship. This intimate understanding of RecipeTin Eats’ codebase, roadmap, and aspirations allows us to offer a level of support that is both comprehensive and responsive.
RecipeTin Eats is a site that many of us use every day, and it is a delight to be able to improve their performance and deliver us all a faster site. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for our partnership.”
Ryan McCue, Director of Product, Altis Cloud
The Altis Cloud and RecipeTin Eats partnership shows what’s possible when two organizations with shared values come together.
Through our innovative, scalable, and efficient solutions, we have helped RecipeTin Eats enhance performance, manage costs, and focus on what they do best: creating and sharing content that delights users worldwide. This collaboration is the perfect example of how Altis Cloud meets enterprises where they are, providing not just a hosting service, but a partnership for success.