Egusto Recipes

The challenge

Egusto needed a recipe platform that worked like a modern social app — not a blog. Users had to be able to save, annotate, and share recipes; authors needed tools to publish rich multimedia content; and search had to feel instant.

The existing site was a WordPress instance held together with plugins. Performance was slow, search was keyword-only, and the editorial experience was painful.

What we built

A complete rewrite on a custom stack:

• Frontend: Next.js App Router with server components, streaming responses, and an image-first design.
• Search: Algolia-backed typeahead with faceted filtering (cuisine, time, dietary restrictions, ingredient inclusion/exclusion).
• Content platform: custom CMS for authors with structured recipe fields, rich-media embeds, and revision history.
• Social layer: user accounts, saved recipes, annotations, follows, and a personalized feed.
• Mobile-first UI: every flow tested on small screens first, desktop second.

Results

• Page load time dropped from 4.2s to 0.9s on mobile.
• Search engagement up 3× compared to the legacy keyword search.
• Editorial publishing time cut from ~40 minutes per recipe to ~8 minutes.
• Lighthouse mobile scores: 96 Performance, 100 SEO, 98 Accessibility.

What we learned

Recipe sites live or die by search. Spending the engineering budget on a great search experience (rather than a prettier homepage) drove more of the metrics that mattered than anything else.

Also: server components plus a small-but-smart client bundle is the right shape for this category of site. Full SPAs are overkill; full SSG without hydration kills the interactive features. The hybrid is where it lives.