Absolutdrinks.com

Absolutdrinks.com was my first big high-traffic project. I’ve worked on it since 2018, when it was a headless WordPress setup with Nunjucks templates behind Akamai. In 2024 I rebuilt it from the ground up.

The problem

The old setup was four separate systems: a drinks database, a content API, a WordPress install and the front end that stitched them together. Every change touched several of them. The rebuild had to merge all of that into one platform, move thousands of recipes without anyone typing them in by hand, and keep years of Google traffic.

What I built

• A structured recipe catalog with ingredients, measurements, glassware, tools, taste, color and skill level.
• Command-line importers that pull recipes, images and alt texts from the old drinks database and exports. They’re safe to re-run, so we could import again and again until launch.
• Recipe search with facets and rating-based sorting on Algolia, plus a separate ratings API.
• Structured data for recipes, ratings, how-to steps and FAQs, and image sitemaps.
• Custom blocks for editors, like Drink Grid, Drink Hero, How To Mix and Recipe Ingredients.

Not losing search traffic

Before launch I exported the old titles and descriptions for every drink in all six languages and put them back on the new pages. I also built tooling that checked 39,978 legacy URLs against the new sitemap so nothing fell through the cracks.

Speed

Cloudflare sits in front of every page, with cache tags so an edit only purges what changed, and images are resized on the fly. Component scripts load right away, when the browser is idle, or when the component scrolls into view, depending on what it needs.

In numbers

• 3,500+ recipes, 500 ingredient pages and 50 collections
• 20,000+ pages in six languages, served from one system
• Four systems replaced by one

Stack: WordPress (Bedrock, Sage, Acorn, Blade), ACF Pro, WPML, Algolia, Preact, Tailwind CSS, Cloudflare, Pantheon, Pest, GitHub Actions.