We love it when our clients come back for more!
More than a decade ago, Crowd Favorite helped bring Foodgawker to life, pioneering one of the first curated food photography platforms. As the largest visual hub for food bloggers and home cooks alike, Foodgawker became a goto destination for discovering beautifully photographed recipes, while inspiring countless meals and culinary trends.
When the site eventually closed, its loyal community never stopped craving its return. So when new owners sought to relaunch it, they turned to us, the original architects, to modernize and rebuild it for the next generation. Foodgawker isn’t just a recipe aggregator; it’s a community driven showcase of the best in food photography and inspiration. Every post is hand selected, ensuring only the most visually stunning and mouthwatering dishes make it to the homepage. From gourmet creations to everyday home-cooked meals, users explore a highly visual, endlessly scrollable gallery that sparks creativity and connects food lovers worldwide. Foodgawker remains the ultimate destination for culinary discovery.
Challenge
As Foodgawker made its highly anticipated return, it needed a platform capable of serving millions of posts and more than 850,000 high resolution images. The new site needed to be fast, immersive, and endlessly scrollable, while ensuring an intuitive content management process for curators and contributors.
Solution
Crowd Favorite, leveraging decades of expertise in Open Source innovation, designed and implemented a high performance catalog engine that acts as an intelligent bridge between the CMS and the site’s front end. This architecture delivers fast page loads, real-time search, and smooth user interactions, all while preserving WordPress’s intuitive content management.
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Key Results
1.5 Second
Page Load Times
Optimized architecture delivers (pre ads) homepage posts, including engagement data, author details, and high-resolution images, at blazing-fast speeds.
40x Faster
Database Queries
Custom content catalog powered by Sphinxsearch reduces database calls to just 0.04 seconds, significantly improving performance over traditional WordPress setups.
Realtime
Engagement & Personalization
Custom ‘Gawk’ system tracks post popularity in real time, enabling engagement and personalization without slowing down the site.
100% Data Privacy
Privacy First Data Ownership
In house engagement tracking eliminates reliance on third party tools, enhancing privacy and control over user data.
850,000+ Images
Effortless Scalability for Millions of Posts
A strategic synchronization system between WordPress and the catalog allows Foodgawker to grow without performance bottlenecks.
Scalable Architecture
Future Proofed Platform Architecture
Designed a maintainable and scalable system that evolves with Foodgawker’s thriving community of food enthusiasts and bloggers.
By combining technical ingenuity with a deep understanding of user experience, we transformed Foodgawker into a faster, smarter, and more engaging platform, ensuring it continues to be the goto destination for food lovers everywhere.
The Crowd Favorite Difference
Sending out virtual hugs to each and every one of you! Thank you so much for making this happen!!!
– Kristin, Co-owner, Foodgawker
At Crowd Favorite, we believe that digital experiences should feel effortless, intuitive, and deeply human. It’s not just about writing code, it’s about crafting platforms that connect people, fostering communities, and creating something that feels natural to use. Foodgawker was about restoring a beloved space where food lovers, bloggers, and home cooks come together to inspire and be inspired. For M., one of our lead engineers, this project was more than just a technical challenge, it was a personal mission. He dedicated countless hours ensuring every interaction on the site was seamless, every image perfectly crisp, and every page loaded in an instant. Because at Crowd Favorite, we don’t just launch websites, we bring digital experiences to life.
Did you know…
Crowd Favorite has been specializing in WordPress, Web Applications, Open Source & user experience since 2007? You can find our case studies on WordPress.org/enterprise 🌟
