On cooking websites
Preamble
I like cooking. For me, cooking is about two things: the food, and the process. Naturally, I try to make the cooking process as comfortable as possible. One of the most influential parts of the process is the recipe. A good one just seamlessly works, a bad one annoys you in every possible way.
Cooking books just do not work for me, I use many recipes from all over the world and don't need all the other ones. Unfortunately, many cooking website are just TERRIBLE. So this is just a vent on cooking websites, nothing more.
// Warning: this rant contains personal opinions, criticism, and sarcasm. I do not have the intent to harass anyone, these are just my opinions on the subject. The choice of the website was random and all the nitpicks are what makes me feel annoyed in a sarcastic way. I do not rate the quality of the recipe, but rather the current format humanity uses to share them.
Experiment
Lets try to find a recipe for some pancakes. Google for "pancakes recipe". Here are the top options from google:
- Good Old-Fashioned Pancakes Recipe (with Video) by allrecipes.com;
- Pancakes - Fluffy, quick, no-fail by recipetineats.com;
- Easy Fluffy Pancakes Recipe by inspiredtaste.net;
- Homemade Fluffy Pancakes by preppykitchen.com;
- The Easiest, Fluffiest Pancakes Recipe by seriouseats.com.
Rolling a dice, I decided to use option #2 for this case study. Of course it would be better to analyze all 5 and even more to get a better overview, but this is a vent and not a peer-reviewed scientific paper.
So, opening up the website, for me at least it feels sluggish. Lets find out why.
A useless rabbit hole on website loading
Using Chrome's Lighthouse tool, we can quickly take a look at how the page loads.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| First Contentful Paint | 0.5s |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 1.1s |
| Total Blocking Time | 0s |
| Cumulative Layout Shift | 0.001 |
| Speed Index | 0.8s |
Hmmmmmm, everything seems fine. So what is the problem? Oh, maybe its all the ads slowly loading over time?!
So yeah, it is not poor performance. The reason I'm annoyed ALREADY is because the actual space taken up by the contents is so small. Rabbit hole over (surprisingly quickly!), lets jump into the next one.
Percentage of space taken up by actual information
Through a very scientific method of screenshotting, I measured the total size of the webpage on the screen, browser, and config I using to be exactly 4,353,632px, and here are the other areas:
| # | Area | Description | Px | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nav bar | Useful, but not to view the recipe | 889,088px | 20.42% |
| 2 | Ads | There are better ways to make money | 635,343px | 14.59% |
| 3 | Useless infobox | Nice to meet you, but why are you here? | 448,140px | 10.29% |
| 4 | Second search bar | Why?! There is one already 350px above! | 57,715px | 1.32% |
| 5 | Recipe metadata | This is actually useful | 380,116px | 8.73% |
| 6 | Move nav | This would not be needed (more on this later) | 11,136px | 0.25% |
| 7 | Description | Not really needed, but sure | 248,640px | 5.71% |
| 8 | Image | Sure, why not | 513,258px | 11.78% |
So actual content is just 26.22% of the page, not just that, the rest is not even empty! /s
Scrolling to find the recipe
For some reason, the recipes must include at least a few paragraphs on the matter of "why to cook this" and a few others. Now seriously, does anyone read this?
I had to scroll 8886px to see the ingredients! That is almost half of the whole page, and definitely more that I would like to scroll.
An abrupt finale
To be honest, I don't know how to finish this post. I have a few more problems with cooking websites, but I do not have any sense of how to present them in a way that keeps the sarcastic humor of the article up, as well as doesn't get too repetitive and boring. As fun of a problem it is to solve, I do not believe anyone will actually enjoy my answer to it, which damages the core idea behind this piece of writing, that is to entertain the reader at the same time as bringing up an interesting problem in a way too precise manner.
I'd be very happy if reading this gave you at least the smallest joy or smile, as that would mean an evening well spent, and in such case you would be welcome to read any other article on my website. And I hope the demonstration of my frustration with googling recipes is relatable to you, in which case you might be amazed at how clean I managed to my my recipes (advertising my recipes definitely wasn't one of the points to write this rant lol). Have a nice day!