A cookoff calendar that fills itself
323 IBCA, CBA, KCBS, SCA, Lone Star and local contests, filtered by sanctioning body, area and distance. "We're cooking this one" flips to "We cooked this one" when a contest ends.
← The Herd
★ Case study · Lot No. 01 ★
Tipsy Brisket
Rebuilt from the coals up.
A Central Texas competition BBQ team's site moved off a page-builder theme and 40 active plugins onto a native Breakdance build with three plugins written just for them. Same URLs, same recipes and links, a cookoff calendar that fills itself, and zero automated accessibility violations.
⇆ Drag the handle: old site, then ours
At a glance
- Client
- Tipsy Brisket, a competition BBQ team from Dripping Springs
- What we did
- Rebuild, three custom plugins, content move, accessibility, hosting
- Built with
- WordPress and Breakdance on the Zero theme
- Live site
- tipsybrisket.com ↗
- 40→20 active plugins at launch
- 0 sampled pages failing WCAG 2.2 AA on phones (was 6 of 6)
- −62% JavaScript shipped across six sampled pages
- 323 Texas cookoffs on a calendar that updates itself
The challenge
Forty plugins, a calendar showing "No event found", and link pages nobody maintained anymore.
Tipsy Brisket cooks the Texas contest circuit and shares recipes from the grill. Their old site sat on a page-builder theme with 40 active plugins, 12 more installed but switched off, and two abandoned link-in-bio plugins carrying their Instagram and Facebook traffic.
Every sampled page failed accessibility checks on a phone, which is exactly where their visitors arrive. And every URL that already answered had to keep answering, because recipes get shared for years.
What changed
Built for how the team actually runs: a few minutes of editing on a phone between cooks.
Link pages they edit in a minute
Drag to reorder, live preview, 7-day, 30-day and all-time clicks per link, and QR codes, at the same /instagram and /facebook addresses with click history carried over.
Recipes that sort themselves
A native filter reads the course data WP Recipe Maker already stores, so a new recipe lands in the right place without anyone touching a grid.
Coupons as content
17 deals as cards with one-tap code copy, category filters and expiry handling, managed from a simple admin screen instead of another plugin.
No broken links
Every URL that answered on the old site answers on the new one, directly or through permanent redirects for retired archives and tag pages.
Accessible by default
Contrast, visible focus, labeled controls, comfortable tap targets and named media links, plus a public accessibility statement. All 22 public templates pass.
Results
Lighter, faster, fixable
- 20 active plugins, down from 40, with nothing left installed and switched off
- 3 plugins written just for this site: calendar, link pages and coupons
- −62% JavaScript, with a smaller page structure on five of six pages
- 22/22 public templates passing WCAG 2.2 AA checks at every width
Measured with axe-core 4 on the same six pages of each site at 390 and 1440 pixels wide, and with page weight compared on a first visit with an empty cache.
The whole page
Top to bottom
Their own tagline leads, with the two things visitors come for one tap away. Recipes, the news, the team, the Instagram feed and the cookoff schedule follow, all in the team's red, gold and smoke.
- Breakdance
- WP Recipe Maker
- Cookoff calendar plugin
- Link pages plugin
- Coupons plugin
- LiteSpeed Cache
★ Lot No. 06 ★
Too many plugins?
We will count them, cut them and rebuild what is left so it is faster, easier to edit and still answers at every old address.