Case study
The Recipes to Remember
A food publisher in Aurora, built around the writer rather than the recipes.
What it had to do
Recipes at volume, a newsletter, a cookbook to sell, and a personality that is the actual reason anybody returns. Most recipe sites bury the last of those under advertising.
What we decided
Recipe publishing has a well-earned reputation problem: a wall of advertising, a life story nobody asked for, and the ingredients somewhere below the fold. Readers have learned to scroll past all of it, which means the site is fighting its own audience.
The decision here was that the writer is the product. Anu is named, present and the reason a reader comes back rather than going to any of the ten thousand sites with the same recipe. That is worth building around rather than hiding behind a brand.
The rest is structural: categories that let the archive grow, a saved-recipes feature so a returning reader has something to return to, and a newsletter, because a reader who subscribes is a reader you do not have to win from a search engine twice.
What is on the site
The writer is named and present
The differentiator on a recipe site is never the recipe. It is who is telling you about it.
Saved recipes
A reason to come back that does not depend on ranking again next month.
Newsletter throughout
The audience a publisher owns, as opposed to the one a search engine lends them.
A cookbook to sell
The site is a shopfront as well as an archive, which most recipe sites forget.
Categories built for volume
Structure that holds as the archive grows rather than one that needs rebuilding at two hundred posts.
How it performs
- 1928 msto paint the main content, on an emulated mid-range phone
- 265 msto first byte
- 3635 KBtransferred, across 86 requests
Measured 2026-10-24. Median of 3 loads, emulated mid-range phone at 390px, cold cache, waiting for the load event. For context, the median across the 300 Chicago-area small business sites we tested was 1,406 ms, and Google treats anything under 2,500 ms as good. This site is about 0.7× quicker than the local median.
Re-measured rather than remembered, which is why the date is on it.
Where it stands in search
Recipes appear around the first two pages for the dishes they cover — respectable for a young food site, where the competition is every publisher on earth.
Checked 20 September 2026. Go and run the search yourself — that is the point of putting it here. What we do not publish is the client's own traffic: those numbers are theirs, not ours to hand around.
Worth taking from this
On a recipe site the recipe is a commodity. The person is not, and the site should be built around the part that cannot be copied.
Every site, not just this one
What this client got without asking
Every site we build now gets all of this, whichever plan it is on. Most of it is invisible until it is missing.
- Works on whatever they are holding Checked on a phone, a tablet and a desktop, down to the narrow screen of a folding phone. Not shrunk to fit: laid out so it reads properly at each size.
- Readable by the AI assistants people now ask More people start with ChatGPT or a search assistant than with a search box. The words on the page are plain text an assistant can read and quote, rather than something it has to run to see, and the site tells them it is welcome.
- Built to recognised accessibility guidelines We follow WCAG 2.2 AA, the standard most of the world writes into law. That means it works by keyboard, the text can be enlarged without the layout breaking, colours stay readable, and photographs are described for anyone who cannot see them. We follow the guidelines and test against them; we do not sell a certificate, because nobody can honestly certify this.
- Looks right in daylight and at night Where it suits the brand, the site follows the light or dark setting on the visitor's own device, and offers a switch for anyone who prefers the other one.
- Fast on a bad signal The pages are small and there is very little for the phone to do before it can show them, which is what matters in a van or a car park rather than on office wifi.
- Looks right when somebody shares it Paste a link into WhatsApp, LinkedIn or a text and a proper card appears with the right title and picture, rather than a bare address.