{"id":232,"date":"2026-01-20T18:06:29","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T02:06:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/whiskymates.wordpress.com\/?p=232"},"modified":"2026-04-12T16:47:01","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T16:47:01","slug":"new-year-new-features","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/20\/new-year-new-features\/","title":{"rendered":"New Year, New Features"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/menu_whiskyscan_square.png?w=1024\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-240\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/menu_whiskyscan_square.png 1024w, https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/menu_whiskyscan_square-300x300.png 300w, https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/menu_whiskyscan_square-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/menu_whiskyscan_square-768x768.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Hey mates &#8211; we hope your new year is off to a great start. It&#8217;s been awhile since we&#8217;ve posted so we&#8217;re turning over a new leaf in 2026 with lots of new features being released, and plenty more a comin&#8217;!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Suffice it to say, we&#8217;re pretty darn focused on ensuring a high-quality experience for you. So to that end we&#8217;ve been running a user survey recently and have received some really helpful feedback from you all. A lot of it was confirmation of things we had hoped or suspected&#8230;but some of it was surprising, which was also cool. Here&#8217;s a little sampling of what we&#8217;ve heard at the time of this writing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>~70% said their experience has been &#8220;Excellent&#8221; (highest option). We are still blushing, and will continue striving to make the other 30% experience an Excellent one. (Note: ~25% said their experience was &#8220;Good&#8221;).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The biggest negative issue folks are experiencing is slow loading times in certain countries. We are actively working on site speed and performance behind the scenes &#8211; things like optimizing images, javascript, page layouts, etc. so that everyone (especially the ~70% or so of you that regularly use the site on mobile devices) can navigate efficiently &#8211; you&#8217;re all busy and we don&#8217;t want you waiting for pages to appear!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Most people use the site monthly, with a smaller portion using it weekly. Not too many people use it daily right now. Our goal is to continue adding value to the site so that we can be useful as much as possible. To that end, we plan to release iOS and Android native apps, continue expanding the feature set, and adding new whiskies (and more soon!) to the site.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The biggest use cases for Whisky Mates are 1) New whisky discovery and recommendations, and 2) Aggregated ratings \/ understanding which whiskies are highest quality and value. This was great to hear, as this is where we&#8217;ve spent the most time developing the site so far!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>About 71% of users said that it would be &#8220;Extremely&#8221; or &#8220;Very&#8221; useful if we expanded Whisky Mates outside of just whisky to other spirits like Tequila, Mezcal, Rum, Vodka, Gin, etc. What do you think? Maybe we become &#8220;Whisky Mates and More&#8221;? <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;d like to take the survey (it&#8217;s only 10 questions and takes about 60-90 seconds to complete), we would of course love to hear what you have to say. Or if you disagree with any of the findings, we&#8217;d like to know about that too! Here&#8217;s a quick link to that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.surveymonkey.com\/r\/3DFMCKQ\">Whisky Mates User Survey<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Based on these results we&#8217;ve been doubling down in certain areas, and have released a handful of new features recently. We&#8217;ll do a post on each one, so stay tuned for more in the coming weeks! Good night and sleep tight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8211; Whisky Mates<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hey mates &#8211; we hope your new year is off to a great start. It&#8217;s been awhile since we&#8217;ve posted so we&#8217;re turning over a new leaf in 2026 with lots of new features being released, and plenty more a comin&#8217;! Suffice it to say, we&#8217;re pretty darn focused on ensuring a high-quality experience for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,9,11,13],"class_list":["post-232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bourbon","tag-scotch","tag-whiskey","tag-whisky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":243,"href":"https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions\/243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whiskymates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}