Jacqueline Henriquez

Jacqueline Henriquez is a chef with over 15 years of experience using her culinary skills and artistic flair to give food its best visual appeal.

She is very active and influential on social media, so she needed a website to showcase her recipes to the world.

When we first encountered Jacqueline’s website, it was a flimsy attempt at a recipe book, built with plugins that weren’t designed for that purpose.

With over 700 recipes when we started working on it (today it has over 1,100), the challenge was clearly managing all this data without it becoming a complete nightmare.

The main goal was to create a website where Jacqueline’s users could easily access and view her recipes to prepare at home.

The problem? The page took an extremely long time to load before displaying a single recipe.

The causes? There were three main reasons:

1. The template used loaded an enormous amount of resources with each server request.
2. The hosting was of very poor quality.
3. The traffic to the site was excessive for the template’s limited optimization and the low-resource server hosting the site.

One of our challenges was that the website’s theme wasn’t designed to handle heavy traffic.

When we gained access and saw how the recipes were structured, we realized that the data was scattered across different fields. Each recipe consisted of several parts, and because of the way the database table schema was designed (created by the theme the previous agency had purchased), it was nearly impossible to programmatically retrieve the information from the database 😭. This forced us to manually copy and paste over 700 recipes at that point.

Another major challenge, not technical but more of a human one, was managing the expectations of a client who wanted to get this project up and running because it was a crucial part of their brand, and they had trusted us several times in the past only to be let down.

It’s sadly common that many agencies are much better at selling an idea than at bringing it to fruition, so for this client (who is one of our favorite clients) we had to deliver solid results in the shortest possible time and finally give them the confidence they were looking for in having someone who could take charge of their beloved project.

We began the analysis phase, downloading a backup to ensure we could always safely revert to the starting point if any errors occurred.

We started by compiling a list of the data for each recipe that needed to be copied and then got to work.

To begin the design process, the first thing we did was create the sitemap showing how the website would be structured. We then sent the first draft of the homepage for approval.

For final approval of the designs, we send the client a mockup (high fidelity) with the designs assembled to simulate the use, clicks and scrolling of the page, after changing a few details, we successfully complete the design phase.

For this project, we decided that the best approach would be to work with a theme built directly from HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, all done manually.

This ensured that the code was as clean and optimized as possible. We used only WordPress core functions to prevent future issues with updates.

We did this because, with tens of thousands of users visiting the site each month, it also receives numerous bot and virus attacks. As you probably know, one of the main vulnerabilities of a website is outdated plugins.

Therefore, we created a website with no more than 4-5 plugins, all of which are for functions such as antivirus, backups, and themes that have nothing to do with website rendering, so that no updates can affect its proper functioning.

As a final phase before delivering the project, we go through a usability test. We have an internal checklist that we use to track any small details that might be missed, thus ensuring that the client gets a functional, responsive website that loads quickly and is visually appealing to the end user.

As a result, we have a website that has been running smoothly since 2018, with SEO that generates thousands of monthly visits.

We then updated the website in 2020, further enhancing his image as a chef.

So if you have a website with a lot of content, that is already ranked on Google and needs security and a guarantee of online permanence, don’t hesitate to contact us.