Background

I started this project about 1 year ago (I documented here ). Time flies indeed. However, in September 2020, nearly 1 year later, when I was too free and wondered I should do in my extra time, I decided to do revive this website and run it properly this time.

Cost

The website is hosted in http://cookclean.life. It changed from cookclean.me as the previous domain was expiring and I found a new one at $3 (and yet, I talked about running the website properly).

I also updated my subscription with Bubble after 1 year of hiatus. The package is USD16/month for Personal (legacy) plan. There’s an option to buy an annual package but I’m not sure about my commitment at that point (and still at this point of writing this).

I also subscribed to Wordpress to run the website’s blog http://blog.cookclean.life/. The idea of the blog didn’t come to me at first. But my colleague in Marketing team suggested I should run a blog in parallel to help drive traffic and Google ranking. The Wordpress subscription was at USD48/year. I think it’s quite cheap.

There is also ad-hoc cost from running Facebook Ads and Google Ads. Again, I tell myself to spend a bit of money to see if people would want to visit my website.

What’s in it?

Same core functionalities

I thanked myself that I set up a pretty good structure in Bubble last time when I did it for fun. Main structure which includes listing recipes, searching by ingredient and adding recipe was done in 2019. I only made few changes, maybe UI changes. I saved quite a bit of time on that front, because such capabilities are core to this website.

Refresh data

The main difference was the data. One important aspect of this website is how rich and standardised is the recipe library. I crawled 2 more websites (which I personally liked), and did a lot of admin work to tag ingredients to a standardised ingredient library. It was tiring but worth the effort. I once thought if I should use some coding magic to do tagging. By magic, I mean I don’t know yet and need to figure out. I spent 1 day searching for some tagging algorithm but realised how I did it wasn’t important. By tagging manually, I was able to finish upload the recipes and ingredients faster. Indeed, it just took me 1+ week to update the 2 websites (I only did this at night, once or twice a week).

SEO sitemap

Sitemap is important for Google to understand my website. I struggled with generating sitemap because it has somewhat dynamic content together with my blog. Bubble seemed to capture static pages (that were created using their template) and of course wouldn’t know about the existence of my blog in Wordpress. So I have to do manually by uploading a static sitemap, which is not ideal every time I have changes to list of link. To be honest, I still manage manually today. I’m not sure how I can do this better.

Ads

My choices are Instagram Ads and Google Adwords. For this, I had to create an Instagram account for my website and ran Facebook Ads. It really brought me back to when I first ran paid ads in ShopBack. I noticed a lot has changed: the platform interface and ad capabilities. Luckily, the core didn’t change so I could quickly navigate through. My colleague is so helpful to recommend me with some best practices so I can catch up with the scene.

My Google Ads was slow at first but that was because I set my budget too low (like $2). I increased it to $5 then the impressions started to increase rapidly.

After 2+ weeks of running (and tweaking content both in ads and landing pages), I figured out which ads performed well so I could optimise traffic further. However, my bounce rate is quite high and there wasn’t much interaction within the website. I think there are few reasons:

1. Instagram ads: User opened the website in in-app browser, which is not intuitive for user to explore the website.
2. Google ads: The keywords that drove traffic to my website are quite general (e.g. diet), which didn’t really tell if my website matches with users’ interest.

Updated 1 Nov: Based on these hypotheses, I did few tweaks here and there. Hopefully, it will help but who knows.

Write blog

I also need to update my blog http://blog.cookclean.life/. I decided my main content will be meal planning diary as I do meal prep weekly so I don’t have to think much. However, the problem is I kept forgetting to take photos to use in the blog. I find the taking photos is disruptive to my experience in general. I’m not sure how other bloggers do it. Don’t they find the experience is broken because you need to capture the experience? I still try my best to remember but somehow I keep forgetting. So far, my blog hasn’t helped with traffic yet, but I guess I shouldn’t be too impatient. What will come will come.

Website

Updated 20 Feb 2021: As I thought I might do some changes to the website so I wanted to screenshot few pages before they get changed.

Main page: Why you should meal prep

Ingredients page: Choose ingredients you want to reuse

Recipes page: Select recipes for your meal prep

Recipes page: Find recipes by adding / removing ingredients

Recipes page: Selected recipes

Individual recipe page: Show detailed ingredients of a recipe