At Great British Chefs, we’re always looking at how we can make the site better. Every week we publish new recipes, features, cooking guides and videos, but sometimes it’s the way the site actually works that makes the biggest difference. While we get ready to launch our first ever cookbook and continue to collaborate with the nation’s greatest chefs to get an insight into how they cook, we’re also looking at the technical side of things to ensure our content is as accessible as possible.

These changes might not be as noticeable as a new recipe collection or feature, but they’re a vital part of our mission to always improve, build upon and expand our offering. That’s why we thought we should let you know what we’ve been up to over the past few months.

Earlier in 2017 we started to look at how our search worked and how it could be improved. We decided a complete overhaul was the best course of action, changing the way our search engine behaved when used by you. We released it at the beginning of July after listening to your suggestions, and almost instantly saw that more of you were using it to find recipes and articles that might’ve been a little bit hidden before. You can now sort by relevance or publishing date, more easily filter your results by course, author or difficulty, and say whether you’re looking for a recipe, article or chef. It can also work out when you’ve made a spelling mistake and show you what it thinks you’re looking for. All this means finding the recipes and features you want is quicker and easier than ever.

AMP is something that’s been quietly adopted by many of the world’s biggest websites, and we’re now one of them. In short, it’s a way of getting our webpages to load quicker than ever when you find them through Google on your mobile. It works by saving the the important parts of the page on Google’s servers – like images and text – before loading everything else, such as ads or content at the bottom of the page which you’ve yet to scroll down to.

Over half of all visits to Great British Chefs is now through a phone or tablet, so it’s important for us to make browsing the site from your palm as easy and speedy as possible. Not only does it save your mobile phone data, it also means you can load our recipes and features almost instantaneously.

We’re one of the first food websites to implement AMP, something we’re able to do thanks to our in-house tech team and the fact we are a digital-first publisher. To give it a go, search for one of our recipes (e.g. ‘chicken bhuna recipe’) in Google on your mobile or tablet. You should be able to see a little lightning icon and the word AMP in the page description. Whenever you see this little sign, you’ll be able to load a page instantly.