High-Traffic Recipe Portal for KwestiaSmaku.com

KwestiaSmaku.com is one of Poland's most visited recipe websites, offering a large catalog of dishes and culinary inspiration for home cooks. Implementation work focused on extending Drupal features, sustaining massive traffic spikes, and keeping the production site available while changes rolled out.

The client

KwestiaSmaku publishes recipes, photos, and cooking tips for audiences ranging from beginners to experienced home cooks. Logged-in users save favorite dishes, add private notes, and share recipe lists. Public traffic reaches millions of page views each month, with sharp increases during holidays such as Easter and Christmas when thousands of users browse recipes at the same time from phones and tablets in the kitchen.

Challenge

The platform needed to:

• Serve thousands of concurrent visitors without slowdowns during daily cooking hours and seasonal peaks.
• Add search, favorites, notes, and social features without taking the site offline for maintenance.
• Reduce database load caused by complex Views listing queries on the homepage and category pages.
• Keep recipe pages fast on mobile devices where users follow steps while cooking.
• Release changes safely on a live site where even brief downtime affects meal preparation.

Solutions

Performance profiling and database load reduction

Blackfire, Xdebug, and New Relic profiling located bottlenecks. An unused Browscap module was removed after it triggered costly database queries on every page request. The heaviest Views-driven recipe lists were moved from MySQL to an existing Apache Solr index, cutting the longest database queries to roughly one fifth of their previous duration and lowering overall database stress.

Search API Solr for listings and recipe discovery

Search API Solr already powered site search. A dedicated Solr index was added for homepage and category recipe lists that previously relied on heavy SQL joins. Faceted filters, autocomplete, and AJAX-driven result updates let visitors search by phrase, ingredient, or dish type without full page reloads.

Favorites, notes, and logged-in personalization

The Flag module backed favorite recipe lists with drag-and-drop ordering. Users can clone shared lists, email links, or post lists to Facebook. Private notes on individual recipes let cooks record substitutions and timing adjustments. Facebook login simplified account creation for returning visitors.

SEO and social metadata

Metatag configuration shaped how recipes appear in search results and social previews, including ratings, review counts, and recipe images tuned for external sharing.

Responsive front end and kitchen-focused UX

Front-end updates using Sass, Less, and JavaScript improved layout across screen sizes. A built-in kitchen calculator converts ingredient volumes and weights, and a mobile backlight lock keeps recipe steps visible while cooking without the screen dimming.

Zero-downtime release process

Jenkins tests on staging preceded night-time production releases through Aegir, with the hosting provider on standby to limit unplanned downtime.

Result

KwestiaSmaku.com continues to handle millions of monthly page views on Drupal without expanding server infrastructure. Solr-backed listings and targeted caching reduced database pressure during peak holiday traffic. Editors and developers can ship features on a site that stays online while users cook, with search, favorites, notes, and mobile-friendly recipe pages live on production.

Examples of implemented features:

• Solr-powered recipe search and category listings with faceted filters and autocomplete.
• Favorite recipe lists with drag-and-drop ordering, cloning, and Facebook sharing.
• Private per-recipe notes for logged-in users.
• Kitchen calculator for ingredient volume and weight conversion.
• Metatag-driven recipe previews for search engines and social networks.
• Mobile backlight lock for uninterrupted recipe reading.
• Night-time deployment workflow with automated staging tests.