Here’s what goes on behind the scenes of a food blog in its third year of operations: the lessons, the finances, and plans for the future.

• Reviewing Performance
• A Year of Turtling
  • A Subtle Rebranding
• Past Promises
• Lessons Learned
• Going Forward
• A Message to Future SWR

Reviewing Performance

Let’s begin with the numbers. Here’s a table summarising the blog’s performance in the three years since its inception:

	9/2022-8/2023	9/2023-8/2024	9/2024-8/2025	Since inception
Posts	60	43	50	153
Views	16,808	51,572	72,271	140,651
Costs (USD$)	122	421	421	964
Revenue (USD$)	22.7	200.3	400.7	623.7
Profit (USD$)	-99.3	-220.7	-20.3	-340.3

Generally, I was able to maintain a consistent schedule of posting once a week. It’s not a perfect record, but I’m not a perfect person and this is just a fun little side project (you can see the effects of me prioritising life over the website in the 2023/2024 numbers). Hopefully this consistency builds trust with dedicated fans that come back for the new recipe dropping every Thursday.

Despite only spending 2 or 3 hours a week on the site, there was still steady growth in the view count and consequently the ad revenue. Still, the increase in ad revenue was not enough to offset the jump in cost from renewing the various Bluehost plans.

But this site is tantalisingly close to being cost-neutral, and I was finally able to afford the time to reduce the overhead. To show you how I did that, let’s use another table to see how my costs were distributed.

Function	Old provider	Old cost USD$/yr	New provider	USD$/yr
Hosting	Bluehost	144	Bluehost	144
SSL	Bluehost (Single Domain SSL)	90	Let’s Encrypt	0
Domain .com	Bluehost	22	Bluehost	22
Domain privacy and protection	Bluehost	15	Bluehost	15
Site backup	Bluehost (Codeguard Basic)	48	Boldgrid (Total Upkeep)	30
Malware protection	Bluehost (Sitelock)	96	Wordfence	0
Total USD$		415		211

I used to rely on Bluehost for all of the services that a website needs. The convenience is definitely handy, but Bluehost definitely charges a premium for the privilege of keeping everything under one roof. But now that I have built up a bit of confidence, I have the courage to shift some functions onto other service providers that do the same things for less money.

Now, this blog is (and will remain) a small passion project, and I am more than happy to keep the lights on at my own expense. But I still want to pay some attention to the business side of things, to learn something that is totally different from my day job.

You can see that the biggest savings were from the SSL and malware protection. By getting a free SSL instead of the USD$90 WordPress SSL service, and switching from the USD$96 WordPress Codeguard to Wordfence (which is also free), I was able to bring the costs of running this site down by basically half. Here’s to hoping that the site will start turning a profit in 2025/2026 and let me recoup some of the costs from past years.

A Year of Turtling

The first year of SWR was spent getting into the groove of blogging, fitting it into my routine, and figuring out the technical aspects of running a website. The second year was spent trying to keep the website going while lots of things went on in my personal life. Now that I’ve gotten a bit of a breather, I finally have the chance to get things done beyond merely keeping up with the weekly posts.

One promising new direction is the addition of restaurant reviews. Trying new food is high on my list of priorities whenever I travel, and I enjoyed documenting my experience eating at these two star Michelin establishments – Sühring at Bangkok, and Kwonsooksoo at Seoul.

In terms of user experience, I got feedback from readers more than once that the automatic ad placement from Google Adsense was pretty intrusive. After seeing a friend go through the site on their device, I have to agree.

I thought I had toned it down already last year, but turns out I only changed the ad layout on the homepage. Adsense has an ad placement strategy for each type of page, so I had to go through a couple of posts with different layouts to make sure the ads don’t disrupt the user experience. That’s something I hope to  chip away at over the next few months.

In other news, I (finally!) had the time to set up the Google Search Console for the blog. Turns out, viewer sessions average from around 40 seconds to a bit over a minute. I don’t know if that includes the dozens of spam bots that come to leave messages in my contact box, but if so then that’s great news because the real human views must be much longer. I haven’t done anything with the GSC data yet though, and perhaps with time I will learn how to do so.

A Subtle Rebranding

Astute readers may notice that the subtitle under the website name has changed. The old title reads like this:

It’s a brief, honest admission that this is a humble personal blog run by me with limited time, skill or equipment. But this site has been up and running for 2 years now, and the substance of it has gradually developed over that time. So I feel that it deserves a new subtitle:

Which is more reflective of the truth. It’s not exactly a collection of authoritative recipes, it’s not always about meal prep, and it’s not even always something that’s served with rice. But it’s about what I eat, which happens to be fitness-minded meal preps 90% of the time.

The rewording is my way of formalizing the change in how I feel about this website: an announcement of greater confidence, casting a wider net, and a move towards higher standards for content.

Past Promises

While the cost reduction was a big win, I’ve made zero progress with the ebook that I’ve been thinking about the ebook for two whole years. The weekly newsletter hasn’t grown by much either, so maybe it’s time for me to knuckle down and make a lead magnet to sell the mailing list.

(Not on the newsletter yet? Fix that by filling in the form!)

Lessons Learned

I’ve heard before that blog traffic tends to be seasonal. Traffic and ad revenue was relatively quiet from October to December, and there were definitely spikes in activity around Christmas and Valentine’s Day when people are out and about, looking for ideas on what to cook on their special occasions. But some recipes are even more specific, like the Zongzi recipe that gets almost all of their attention around the Dragon Boat Festival in late May.

My recipe for homemade Umeshu (a Japanese plum liqueur) used to have the views peak in May when the ume tree bears fruit, but ever since I shared it on Reddit it has picked up a steady stream of organic search traffic. This goes to show that the judicious use of social media for self promotion is effective and budget-friendly (it’s free!) – just make sure you follow the rules of each community. You are a guest crashing on their couch after all, so have respect and keep the metaphorical house clean while you’re there.

As the blog matures, I really want to have recipes for every season and occasion, so there’s always some content that is relevant to the times. But oftentimes it takes so long for me to plan, execute, and write a recipe post that the season is over by the time I publish. This is a hobby site after all, and I have to ration my effort.

However, I did manage to create this post on oven baked barbecue ribs and duck fat fries in time for the 4th of July. Even though I’m really proud of how the recipe came out, it didn’t do as well as the Umeshu recipe. Perhaps there’s more competition for American food in the food blogging space, or maybe the Umeshu post has been around for longer and that helps the SEO. In either case, having my grandma’s culinary lineage definitely gives me a comparative advantage when writing about comfy home-style Cantonese food.

Going Forward

I’m afraid a lot of the site development to-do list is basically the same as the one from last year. I still need to figure out how to block spambots from swamping my contact box and newsletter, and I still need to figure out how to tone down the Google auto ads.

In terms of content, I’m looking forward to writing more travel related content. Not just fine dining, but also more local cuisine from hole-in-the-wall, mom and pop type of places. I’d be interested in trying authentic versions of dishes I’ve made before – almost like comparing my results to a marking scheme.

Seasonal content is another thing I want to work on. Search engine traffic increases with time, so hopefully the site can grow by having mature posts that capture traffic from special occasions and holidays throughout the year.

Time will tell how much of this I get done by next year. Perhaps I’ll stand a better chance if I make space for site development in my routine, but that depends on whether my other priorities let me.

A Message to Future SWR

Thanks for sticking around until the end! I can’t believe the site has been going for three years already. Time really does fly when you’re having fun.

I started writing these annual reports to keep myself accountable, but over time I also wanted to use this as a way to show prospective bloggers a more realistic picture of what blogging is about.

It’s human nature to only talk about good news, so whenever a blog publishes its financials it’s often a blog that is doing relatively well. With my own annual reports, I hope to show you the numbers behind a blog that I didn’t put too much time into, and isn’t particularly successful.

The fourth year is probably going to look a lot like the third. But with the costs brought down to more reasonable levels, the site might finally start to turn a small profit. If the blog recoups its costs, I might even start spending money on it with advertising!

Besides keeping the new posts coming, I look forward to doing more on the back end to optimise user experiences.

This concludes the third annual report for www.servedwithrice.com. I hope you liked this deep dive into the inner workings of this food blog! Join the newsletter if you want to stay updated on further developments, and get the scoop on new recipes. I’d love to see you around here again!

Cheers!

SWR

13/12/2025

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