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Most recipe adaptation advice is a substitution list: butter becomes vegan butter, milk becomes oat milk, done. That works until it doesn't, and when it fails it fails in the oven, after you've bought the ingredients. This is the method that holds up.
Every ingredient in a recipe is doing a job. Before you replace anything, work out which job it is doing, because the substitute has to do that same job. An egg in a brownie is a binder. An egg in a meringue is structure. An egg in a custard is a thickener. Those are three different problems and they have three different answers, which is why "what replaces eggs" has no single correct response.
Ingredients usually do one or more of these:
When you name the job first, the substitution becomes obvious. Butter in a shortbread is fat plus structure, so the swap has to be solid at room temperature, which rules out oil. Butter in a muffin is mostly fat and moisture, so oil is fine.
Go through the ingredient list and mark only what genuinely conflicts. This sounds obvious, but over-substituting is the most common way people ruin a recipe. If you are cooking gluten-free, the butter, milk, and eggs are already gluten-free. Leave them alone. Every unnecessary swap is another chance to change the result for no reason.
Then check the ingredients that hide things. Soy sauce contains wheat. Many broths contain gluten and dairy. Chocolate often contains milk solids. Worcestershire contains anchovy. Marshmallows and some yogurts contain gelatin. These are the ones that catch people out, and they are exactly what a scan of the obvious names misses.
A substitute at the wrong ratio is a failed recipe. These are the ones worth memorizing:
This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the one that decides whether the dish works. When a substitute behaves differently, the instructions have to change:
Some swaps are invisible. Tamari for soy sauce, oat milk for dairy milk in a batter, nobody will know. Others genuinely change the dish: a dairy-free chocolate mousse is lighter and looser than the original, and gluten-free pizza dough has a different chew no matter what you do. Knowing which is which before you serve it is the difference between a happy dinner and a disappointing one.
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Related: Recipe Adapter · All substitution guides · Gluten-free converter · Vegan converter