I used to have comments here on CulinaryLore. One of the most annoying comments I ever got was on an article that answered a yes or no question. The commenter said that none of the article was needed. One word, yes, would have sufficed. Why was I annoyed? Not because of a trollish comment but because it reflects a huge misunderstanding of how we find information on the internet, particularly through Google. If I had written ONE word, this privileged commenter would never have seen my article! The same goes for recipe food bloggers, who often write much more than is necessary to give you a recipe.
Now, I have a confession. I rarely use food blogs to find recipes. Why? Because I don’t think most of the recipes are any better than those you find on recipe compilation sites like AllRecipes (with many exceptions, of course).
Also, the user experience is usually terrible with too many huge images that take forever to load (because they are not optimized), pop-ups, pop-unders, affiliate links, and countless other things I can’t even name with dozens of competing ads vying for space.
And, yes, I don’t want to read your life story and ten pages of memories before I get to a recipe. But guess what? I’ll bet you that most food bloggers would rather not have to write a ten-page essay just to introduce a recipe!
Actress Mindy Kaling recently received a lot of flack for asking the same question:
Why do all online recipes have endless pages of the chef’s whole life story about the recipe and then on the 12th page is the actual recipe?” “I just want the recipe! I don’t need the Modern Love essay on how you came up with it!”
I get it. And, frankly, I agree. I don’t need any of that either. But, unlike Kaling, I understand completely what a food blogger is up against. You see if a food blogger just posted a recipe with no other introduction, images, notes, tips, etc. Google would not give that recipe much love. Or, so food bloggers believe (I’ll get to that).
Google Likes Long Articles With Lots of Detail
Before I get to the point, I want you to take note of something. I want you to notice how long this article is! Could I have made my point in fewer words? Yes! But would you have ever seen this article? Probably not. Google likes long articles with lots of detail. Likewise, I could make a similar point about an article called Dear Food Bloggers: Stop Yammering And Give Me The Dang Recipe published in The Federalist. It’s ironic to complain about yammering with yammering. So, I will not complain in this article. Instead, I’ll try to point out a few things.
You see, having a successful blog requires what the industry calls SEO (Search Engine Optimization). So, you have to include much more rich information in the headnotes of a recipe page. This information can include all sorts of things.
Food bloggers often include the process of making the recipe, other tips on ingredients or storage, serving recommendations, wine recommendations (or beer), and, yes, personal stories or memories related to the dish. We can question which of these are necessary, but some or all of them ARE necessary.
Sometimes the extra information would be useful, if the reader could figure out what their eyes were supposed to focus on and find the information that is relevant to the page. Instead, most food blogs are so busy they are continually flickering. A seizure warning may be in order. But, I digress (are you getting my point?)
Also, we have to consider all those ads. As you peruse CulinaryLore you will notice ads being displayed. Those ads will tend to show up in the same places and, hopefully, not be intrusive or annoying (something many food bloggers need to note). If I do notice certain ads becoming intrusive because of automatic placement, I will try to curb that problem as best I can.
Food Bloggers Need Space For Ads
However, if one of my articles is only a paragraph long, or, if I simply display a recipe with no introduction, there will not be any physical space for those ads. Therefore, my ability to make money and basically, be paid for my work will suffer. So, food bloggers need to allow the physical space and format for ads and other promotions to appear. We’re trying to make a living here, folks, not just give ourselves ulcers trying to run a website out of the kindness of our hearts.
Food bloggers use recipe cards to display the actual recipe. If the only thing that appeared on the page was this recipe card, the number of ads that could comfortably appear on the page would be curtailed. Again, that many food bloggers try to display an uncomfortable number of ads is a different issue. Over one hundred ads will not perform better than three or four ads.
Are Personal Stories Necessary For SEO or For Readers?
However, I did say that food bloggers believe that they cannot compete in the food blogger industry without long and sometimes rambling stories and intros. For example, I read an article by a food Blogger on the site TrendIngredient. She was writing about how everything you know about food blogging is wrong and explaining to her readers that it’s not all about recipes:
Readers don’t just want to know how to make a dish; they also want to understand the inspiration behind it, the techniques used, and the personal anecdotes that make the recipe come alive.
I don’t know where to draw statistics or evidence to support such a statement. I doubt very much that most readers care about a food blogger’s personal stories. A few readers? Certainly. But, not to offend my own constant readers, but if I website makes decisions based on the relatively few constant readers, it is like a bar catering to the 5 people who hang out all night nursing a single beer. You’ll go under!
And I don’t use this analogy about a bar without reason. I suspect that the author of the above-mentioned piece was influenced to believe this by the glowing comments left by a relative few readers. She failed to consider the many readers who do not leave comments, negative or positive. This is a lesson for us in the importance of a “representative sample.” Your regular readers who leave comments are not an accurate sampling of your readership at large.
I don’t think I have to convince you that most readers are looking for recipes and possibly some further information about individual techniques in a recipe. Clearly, though, the blogger quoted above, and many others are convinced that it is necessary to write a whole novel on every page.
Am I suggesting that this is not necessarily true? Yes. The truth is I ‘compete’ pretty well on CulinaryLore with recipes that contain only an intro of two to three paragraphs and then the recipe. I don’t even bother with the recipe cards. And, the intros are only essential information. I don’t have many recipes on this site, so my database is limited, I’ll admit.
But, look at it this way. If you search for a recipe for chicken casserole, chances are one of the first results will be a recipe compilation site like AllRecipes, which does not as often offer detailed and long headnotes. Yet, these sites often seem to out-compete food blogger sites. So, what gives?
How Does AllRecipes Out-Compete Food Bloggers?
First, it’s not true that none of the recipes on AllRecipe have header notes with lots of tips and other information before the recipe card at the bottom. Consider this recipe for Best Chocolate Chip Cookies, for example. This is a recipe given by “AllRecipes Test Kitchen.”
Regardless, there are billions of recipes on the web contained in thousands of sites. That one chicken casserole recipe you find on Google is a sample of one. It does not represent the reality, which is that AllRecipes (or another such site) may only get one to two hits on this page per day, if not less! They make up for that through quantity.
In the article linked above, the author stated that if you Google “best chocolate chip cookies” the first result will be from AllRecipes. Here comes a lesson in “SEO” for said author. YOU ARE WRONG.
Just because one person types in a search in Google and gets a certain result doesn’t mean that everyone gets the same result. There can be different results on desktop versus mobile and even different results in different locations. As well, there may be different results for signed in users versus those who are not signed in (to a Google account). My result? A food blogger named Laura from Joy Food Sunshine. Sally’s Baking Addition seems to own the second result for that search, though. (Update: 6/20/2025 and Joy Food Sunshine still owns the first result for me, wow!)
There may be periods of time that a recipe page gets many views per day but most pages do not continually enjoy such traffic on a long-term basis. Eventually, a site like AllRecipes will become a collection with a relative few top pages and a long list of pages that barely get any hits.
Quantity Versus Quality
If you have 50,000 recipes, you don’t need that many hits on any individual recipe. And, some recipes will get many more. For these sites, the game is quantity and quality. But, when you have hundreds of users doing the work, you have a huge advantage over the individual food blogger. By the way, no, Google doesn’t “punish” sites for having too many pages. It’s not considered spam just by virtue of being a large site.
Individual food bloggers can’t compete with that kind of quantity! Comparing an individual blogger to a user-fueled compilation site is a false comparison. Food bloggers cannot afford to have a recipe only receive one or two hits per day. They need all the users they can get for each and every page on their site. So, they have a greater need to optimize.
And, think of all the work that goes into developing a recipe, experimenting, and, all that food photography. Your ability to ‘set and forget’ a page on your site has everything to do with the time it took you to make it. It is immensely more difficult to run a blog than to submit a recipe to a recipe-compilation site.
Food bloggers work much much harder than you think! Even the behind-the-scenes details of running a site can take up a lot of your time (that’s why you need a good host like mine WPX).
And, remember that commenter? The one who said I should have only written ‘yes’ on my page to answer a question? Food bloggers have to deal with this kind of entitlement much more than I do.
My Food Writing Bias
Despite all this, I have already confessed that I get annoyed by long personal stories about a dish. But, I try to understand my biases, and this is a big one. I do not write about food this way very often. This is not how I prefer to share my passion and creativity. I relate to food in a different way.
In truth, I don’t even consider myself a food blogger in the classic sense at all. Long personal stories about food don’t appeal to me and I would not enjoy writing them. I’m bored by reading them and writing them!
But if I don’t want to read a long personal story, I will try to find a shortcut to the recipe or scroll down to the bottom. Or, I will simply click away. So, to food bloggers, I say, do your thing. Write as much as you want and then more! I know I do (can’t you tell?). While I understand all the writing, there is no excuse for a page that takes five minutes to load, though! There is also no excuse for a noisy, disorganized, and noisy page that seems hell-bent on preventing me from ever making it to the article way down at the bottom of a page that seems like a slow descent down the rabbit hole.
There are many things food bloggers can do to give their users a better experience! I want to share them as a reader, but not in the guise of an expert, which I am not. So I’ll skip the yammering notes on good writing and clever metaphors, and actually give food bloggers, to the best of my ability, some notes on how to improve the experience for your readers.
Tips For Food Bloggers To Improve User Experience
1. Limit pop-up or pop-over ads and make sure your ads do not slow down your page loading. Here on Culinary Lore, ads appear, after a certain time on site, between page loads. They do not, however, pop up in the middle of a page while you’re trying to read! If your ad provider does not provide a way for you do do this, such as asynchronous loading, consider deferring javascript, This will help make sure that the essential parts of the page, the textual information, loads before any unnecessary scripts. Many good caching plugins offer the ability to defer javascript and you probably need a caching plugin anyway, from what I’ve seen.
2. Make sure your ads are not intrusive and that they do not make it difficult to find the actual content of the page. When an ad or some other call to action appears after every paragraph, users quickly get annoyed and have a difficult time finding the information they came for.
3. Include plenty of white space! White space is perhaps the most important thing you can do for the reader. It helps the reader find their place on the page and makes the actual written content easier to read. I often find myself having to shorten paragraphs on articles when I realize there is not enough white space, making the page harder to read. In fact, this is a lesson I was slow to learn and it has caused me to have to go back and edit hundreds of articles to make them more friendly to the reader. I’ve even gone to far the other way and had to re-edit! You learn as you go.
4. Do not include too many promotions that make the content hard to absorb. It is often difficult to tell a promotion from the actual page content. Some food blogs have so much ‘noise’ inserted into every page that it’s almost impossible to read. There is no excuse for a page full of distractions and noise. It reeks of desperation. If there is somewhere you want your readers to go, make it clear! They do not need or desire 30 promotions. When you link to other recipes, keep them to a necessary minimum and make them related! The best recipe is to the one that will complete or complement the meal being made or regards a necessary component of said meal. Show you have respect for your reader’s time. I’m working like crazy to provide key point summaries for my longer articles so that my readers no they can trust me not to waste their time when they are in a rush and need the vital points of into now.
5. Optimize your images! When you load twenty full-sized images (with huge file sizes) onto your site, each one can lag and take forever to load.
And, if the loading of your page is not prioritized properly, these images can interrupt the loading of the written content (the same goes for ads). Scale down your images to make the file the file size as small as possible and do not make your images way bigger than they are intended to be on the page. Also, use a plugin to optimize your images (I’m not an expert in this but I use them). Don’t just load a huge image and let it automatically fill the window. Size it down in advance to ‘fit’ in the window.
NEVER use an image straight from your camera! The file sizes are HUGE!
As well, big png files are often too big. A smaller jpg file will work just fine for your blog. Even for your pretty food picture. You can also use the new webp format (although browser support may not be as wide) and there are plugins that will automatically change all your image files to webp format, which offers better compression.
Again, I’m am not an expert on this, but my last advice is to read up on the simplest methods to optimize your images but do not try to over-optimize and spend hours loading different size images for different devices or screen sizes (src-set type stuff). It’s largely a waste of time that could be spent on more important things.
6. Always, always think about speed! You need a fast site, especially on mobile phones. So, everything above is related to speed. The more bells and whistles you put on every page, the slower your site and the worse your user experience. You want your readers to see all that stuff you wrote immediately.
You’ll never make your site as fast as technically possible. Focus on making it as fast as practically possible. And, my last, final advice on this matter. Do not adapt new technologies related to “fast blazing websites” just because it’s what all the SEO folks are buzzing about. Chances are, those technologies will be outdated two years from now and will be abandoned, and you’ll be be stuck with a bunch of useless remnants that do more harm than good. Steady and slow development is best, not revolutionary changes in website technology. They rarely work out for anyone.
7. Realize that Google doesn’t just consider your individual pages. It considers your site as a whole. Are you an authority in the eyes of Google? Do you give readers what they want? Google may be promoting huge recipe compilation sites over your site despite your SEO attempts. Why is this?
To sum all this up, food bloggers often need to think much more about user experience. We all want to make money from our work but if you do not provide at least a pleasant user experience, it won’t matter how many ads or affiliate links you include on your page.
