We've ran the site through the wonderful ScreamingFrogSEO tool and found a host of small little tweaks. Most of this you won't notice and are, as the name suggests, SEO tweaks. But some were great little finds like large file sizes on some pages (we forgot to convert some large PNG's to avif for example) and some inline width / height attributes to help with layout shift.

A good hour well spent if you ask us, we love these small tiny site wide tweaks. A host of papercuts!

A very small fix for premium members. The cocktail creator wouldn't load up the optional ingredient choice modal due a refactor we made a while ago. This is fixed.

An early morning clean-up of a couple of bugs that got introduced yesterday when we were busy working away on the site. List creation now works (sorry about that) and a couple of rogue cocktails that weren't loading now are.

Right coffee time!

As you can see from the timestamps on these updates, its been a fun week just getting more content on the site and fixing a host of small backlog requests.

We've added 2 more premium lists to our Listmania page:

We've also added a couple more cocktails (ie the Seven and Seven). And whilst we were doing all that we fixed a couple of really tiny UI things that annoyed us ... no meta title on creating a list. And a random grey box for premium members due to not showing some adverts (remember to register to premium to get a streamlined version of the site ;)).

We've been really busy this morning trying to fill in more and more of the gaps for our cocktails without images - finding and creating a host of new images for the most highly rated images. We've uploaded 30 new images (and counting) which means that the first 14 pages if you were to view the cocktails sorted by score (https://makemeacocktail.com/search/cocktails?s=) all have images (thats over 336), with a total of around 600 cocktails now with images.

Over time we'll keep on upping this amount to try and fill in more and more of the gaps. As you can imagine creating high quality images of cocktails takes time, but we're working on it! We know how important imagery is to understanding how a cocktail looks.

We use Algolia for our top search in most cases (some cases exist where we dont). To make this more powerful and to help Algolia return better results for users, we now also include a userToken that helps Algolia filter out and include certain results based on the users searches before.

Note - we don't send them any personal data, literally just an ID which is pretty useless in all cases, but helps identify users.

We've made a few changes today to help with searches and results, and produced a few pages to go along with that.

Firstly from the any AI Searches, or from our Search Cloud, we now have theme result pages. For instance heres all the pages that show any questions that users have asked about Amaretto.

Those theme / term pages can be found from most AI searches under the 'tag name' or just clicked on from the parent search cloud page.

Along with this we've done some clever matching, and if the tag of a search is about an individual ingredient (i.e. Amaretto) then we also surface the best ingredient cocktails from that tag. Hopefully giving a bit more context to any search results.

We may have been quiet on the updates from here in our change log, but thats because so much is going on behind the scenes that aren't front facing for all you lot. We've of course been squirrelling away on our Olympic Cocktail Campaign, with a host of new bartenders and brands joining in the fray, but we've also finished up our app and are in the final throws of splash screens, getting it on android, ios etc. We reckon a couple of weeks at most on that one. So exciting.

We've also been fixing some small bugs with cocktail creators, redirects from home pages, and some small tweaks on our ingredient pages.

Like I said, quiet but not quiet. Some big things we've been working on soon coming to fruition.

All of you would have noticed, or maybe the right term is, not of noticed that we dont show an annoying cookie policy acceptance modal / overlay etc when you first visit the site. We don't ask you to accept a heap of things that you don't actually know what you're agreeing to, just because we want to track your usage. Why? Because we don't do that and respect your privacy.

We do track page usage, but by using a cookieless analytics tool (Fathom), and we dont use any 3rd parties such as facebook / google and the like.

However, we've started to implement videos from 3rd parties (such as YouTube) on certain cocktails, and those services do use tracking cookies. For that reason we've stuck up a small disclaimer before the video is embeded, to ensure that you are aware that you are now going to be tracked. It's also kinda the law to show you it.

We only show this notice if you try and load up a video (see the Cosmonaut recipe for an example), so for the most part still no annoying popups or acceptance modals.

We've been working hard on the Olympics hub recently, tweaking bits here and there and getting our first few bartenders in to the system. You'll see our first two (or more?) on there now.

We've also been working hard on our new app (as always) and are putting the final touches to that. We're hoping to have it finished by end of next week ready for launch - get your app updates ready!

Along with all that crazy times, the social media work, the email campaigns, and working with the bartenders, we fixed some dark mode issues, tweaked the serving size suggesting algorithm, updated the search cloud with a host of new searches and more.