BBC Good Food headless platform

The situation

Immediate Media had recently acquired BBC Good Food, a site with about 50 million unique users a month, and was moving it to a headless architecture. The site ran on Immediate Media’s WordPress multisite, which served about 100 million users a month across all its sites. The new architecture had to work for those other sites too, not only for the first one, and the stakeholder deadlines were tight.

I co-led the backend engineering of the new architecture.

The approach

• Contracts first: we defined the API contracts with the frontend team, who render the site from the services’ data.
• Three REST services, built with API Platform (Symfony), PHP 7.4 and MongoDB:
  • the Content API, for posts such as recipes;
  • the Settings API, for site-specific settings;
  • the Saved Recipes API, for users’ saved recipes.
• WordPress pushes changes: when a post is published, edited or deleted, WordPress sends the change to the services automatically.
• Performance at that traffic: the services were load-tested with Artillery and profiled with Blackfire.

Result

BBC Good Food launched on the new architecture, and it gave the other sites on the multisite a path to follow.