KeyIngredient

Partnership with STX Next

June 2013 - September 2017

Founded in 2005, Key Ingredient is based in Austin, Texas, and features more than 2 million recipes that have been shared by cooks over the years. With about 3,000,000 unique visitors per month, their largest demographic segment consists of millennial home cooks. Part of Groupe SEB.

INDUSTRY
Business and Energy
COUNTRY
United States
over 2 million recipes

featured

around 3,000,000
unique visitors a month

Project details

Key Ingredient is a social portal built around cooking where every food fan will find something to enjoy.

The website hosts over 2.2 million recipes which you can add, share and collect into cookbooks.

US Recipe Website Project using Python, Django and Node.js - KeyIngredient - Case Study
US Recipe Website Project using Python, Django and Node.js - KeyIngredient - Case Study
STX Next Delivered
Project Takeover
Project Takeover
Full Scrum Team
Full Scrum Team
Backend Development
Backend Development
Frontend Development
Frontend Development
Manual Testing
Manual Testing
Deployment
Deployment
Grzegorz Derdak
Python Developer @ STX Next

The most challenging part of this project was keeping the page loading time short with almost 2 million recipes in our datastore. That’s why we decided to use Google App Engine with Elastic Search as our main back-end technology. On the front-end side we choose to use Backbone.js.

Challenge

The website, despite its long existence, was poorly optimized for SEO and the design required some refreshment, especially on the mobile site, because the majority of the users access the website from a mobile device. Another issue was that the page loading time was highly insufficient. The code itself contained a lot of legacy code, with outdated libraries and unused features.

Solution

The development team along with the SEO experts on the clients side improved the SEO optimization, thus making the website easier to find using all of the modern search engines: Google, Bing etc. The development team implemented an Elastic Search cluster containing 3 machines to take off the load from the database and ensure reliability. Developers also refactored the most used APIs which made the website much faster in the crucial and most viewed subpages.

Python
Python
Django
Django
Google App Engine
Google App Engine
Node.js
Node.js
CircleCI
CircleCI
AWS
AWS
Docker
Docker
Salt
Salt

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