Hello!
This week, I analyzed the newly released User Experience Report (CrUX) Ad Metrics, part of Google’s Core Web Vitals, for top food blogs’ homepages. These metrics reflect how ad density and resource usage impact page performance.
Here’s what visitors experience on average:
Desktop: ~2.7 ads on screen (15% coverage), 43s of CPU time, and 22 MB downloaded.
Mobile: ~1.5 ads on screen (14% coverage), 13s of CPU time, and 12 MB downloaded.
It’s not surprising that Raptive has kept ad density on these sites well below the Coalition for Better Ads’ ‘unacceptable’ threshold.
However, if you’d ever noticed your device loading a food blog slowly and struggling (fans whirring!), it’s because CPU time and download weights are very high. I’ve noticed this for a while, but now we have the figures.
Raptive, this needs improving urgently.
News Round Up
Study shows 88% of US installations of WordPress need to be upgraded to be secure. Is yours kept updated regularly? (We offer a Maintenance Plan.) On that note, WordPress releases version 7.1.2, a critical security update.
Google rolls out a September spam update. Anecdotally, it looks to be helping food bloggers in the Food Bloggers’ Central Facebook group.
How to overcome camera shyness, an interview with Justin Ellen of Everything Just Baked.
A comparison guide between WPRM and WP Tasty plugins for WordPress (from the makers of WPRM).
Using AI for SEO? Here are some things to be aware of. Bottom line as always: don’t blindly trust anything Claude (or ChatGPT, etc.) says.
New Top Food Blogs
Two new sites joined the top food blogs this week:
Methodology
Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and have posted in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 509 sites.
About Best Served Hot
I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis, clear-cut insights, and industry news you need to know
