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
- 388 msto paint the main content, on an emulated mid-range phone
- 215 msto first byte
- 93 KBtransferred, across 65 requests
Measured 2026-09-20. 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 3.6× 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 What we do not publish is the client's own traffic: those numbers are theirs, not ours to hand around.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.