Why Rocket.net Is The Best Web Hosting For Food Blogs

Let me disclose something upfront here… I can’t cook a darn thing outside of a microwave, so it was completely weird to me that a good chunk of websites I optimized for Core Web Vitals while owning my own agency before joining the Rocket team were food blogs.

I knew absolutely nothing about the typical life of a foodie and how they ran their food blogs other than they made me hungry all the time after looking at their sites.

One of the things I insisted on before taking on a new client website, would be to meet on Zoom and have them talk about their website. I got to know my clients really very well over that time, I was impressed by how passionate these food bloggers were, and just how much work they invested into their sites.

I was also amazed at how much website traffic the sites were getting, leveraging SEO, newsletters and social media to build up enough inventory to generate significant monthly revenue.

As I did my first dozen performance optimizations for these food blogs, they all shared similar traits on the challenge to getting them passing Core Web Vitals — and it always started with proper hosting as the first topic of discussion.

Top 6 Reasons Why Why Rocket.net Is The Best Web Hosting For Food Blogs

1- (Heavy) Food Blogs Need The Fastest WordPress Hosting Available To Them. Period

Let me start by saying that Rocket already hosts some of the biggest and well known food blogs on the internet. Our hosting services are ideal for these types of websites and perform better out of the box than any other hosting company out there.

I knew that already, it’s why I pushed every single client I had to move to Rocket. It was always nice to pocket $150 for each referral as an affiliate and make some extra money, but in reality made my life much easier to get their sites passing Core Web Vitals. I could optimize the site in half the time, half the work and half the headaches. I knew that they were getting the best deal out there and would be properly taken care of.

I’m obsessed about website speed and performance, Rocket is the fastest out there.

First thing I would do over a Zoom call with my clients is a speed test and show how their current website hosting is seriously slow them down.

Food blogs get traffic from around the world, the best chocolate chip recipe is equally delicious no matter where you live. Your website may seem fast to you, but it doesn’t means it’s fast for everyone.

Explaining how Cloudflare Enterprise works with the power of full-page caching and global CDN, this is the impact of Time To First Byte (TTFB) and what that actually means to website speed, especially true for food blogs as they need every performance advantage they can get.

2- Other Web Hosting Companies Are Totally Ripping Foodies Off – Way Too Expensive For What You Get!

I would often need access to my client hosting dashboards depending on who they were hosted with and this was something that quite frankly pissed me off. I couldn’t believe how much they were paying every month to host their sites for what they actually got in return.

My clients didn’t know any better, they thought these hosting companies were taking care of them and protecting their livelihoods. There’s no denying that these food websites do chew up lots of bandwidth and have storage needs, but I saw monthly upsells (that were just that) and companies charging them premium prices for average hosting.

I remember one particular client that was paying $600 a month for her hosting, after I convinced her to migrate over to Rocket, her monthly bill fell to $100 a month and was getting a much better overall service. Her website loaded instantly with Rocket.

I found many of my clients had this ‘blind loyalty’ to their existing hosting companies, no particular reason other than they were likely scared to move it and risk something breaking on their websites. That loyalty was not earned….

3- Great Pictures Are Everything To A Successful Food Blog. This Can Be A Problem..

I told you that I knew nothing about food blogs, this was definitely my first lesson learned very early in the game. Foodies are insanely protective of their photos and how they look on their websites.

Fancy digital cameras with super resolutions, my clients would post their fabulous photos on social media and then use those exact same images on their sites without any thought about how big the original file sizes actually were.

I would do some testing with them on various mobile devices and show the impact of these images, often not resized and they would wonder why their website loading speeds were so slow.

This is where the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is almost always the most common Core Web Vitals issue for food blogs.

This is where Cloudflare Enterprise comes into play again, automatically optimizing images in WebP without plugins and serving everything over a global CDN that makes a huge difference for people visiting your website and what they experience on their devices.

There were many times where I could shave seconds off loading times for clients once hosted with Rocket, solving their LCP problems and ultimately passing them for Core Web Vitals.

4- Food Blogs Are Beautiful, But Too Many Bloated Themes And Plugins

Food blogs are universally fat and I’d say almost every website I optimized was in need of a serious diet!

Pretty shocking the first time I got to see a food blog from the WP-Admin dashboard, there was a cost for looking so good. Dozens of plugins not working together very well, the aesthetic being the primary concern over performance and everything else.

I got to know some of the popular food blog themes and plugins, many used the same ones and they also presented challenges to optimizing for Core Web Vitals.

Reducing the number of plugins you have on your website is important, Rocket eliminates the need for many plugins and can significantly improve your website loading speed.

Many food blogs have social sharing plugins for example with things flying around the screen, don’t understand their use of multiple Google fonts and bloated themes that simply weren’t performant. It’s the accumulation of these bells and whistles in an effort to make it look good that adds real impact to the end-user and how fast your site loads for them.

I would often ask my clients what each plugin actually did, often they had no clue and we were able to reduce the page bloat and get closer to passing Core Web Vitals with every plugin deactivated.

I’ll also add that almost all of the food blogs I optimized had a ton of 3rd-party ads running on them that significantly impacted their PageSpeed Insights (PSI) scores in lab data, always a challenge to explain the difference between their results from these Google performance tests and how real users engaged with their websites.

It was for this reason why I enjoyed working with Mediavine and AdThrive publishers, they were clearly the best ad networks that had already had a handle on performance and made things much easier for me to get the results my clients were looking for. There were other publishers running on other ad networks I refused to take on as clients because they were literally impossible to optimize for core web vitals as a result of the proprietary systems they were using to serve their ads.

5- Food Blogs Need Good WordPress Security, Have You Been Hacked In The Past?

I guess that I shouldn’t be overly surprised about this, but at least half of my clients had explained to me that their website had experienced some sort of security issue in the past and was an ongoing concern that they constantly worried about.

Many of them had several WordPress security plugins running at the same time that they thought would help with website security, with Rocket you don’t need any security plugins as you are protected by the Cloudflare Enterprise WAF and Imunify360.

I had my clients disable all of those unnecessary plugins and I’ve never heard a single thing from them since about any security problems.

6- Food Bloggers (Generally) Aren’t Very Technical And Need Good Hosting Support

That may have come off the wrong way, but food bloggers are proud content producers first, aspirations of becoming a professional web developer to support their websites definitely takes a back seat for the majority of foodies. They are sharing recipes and uploading photos to social media, they shouldn’t need to worry about their websites breaking. It should ‘just work’ without needing to know anything about coding and allow them to focus on building up their audience and making money.

Every WordPress hosting company in the world proudly states they have the best customer support. I’ve built enough WP sites over many years and used many hosting companies myself over that time to tell you personally that’s definitely not the case.

I see what Rocket does every single day for our clients, our Trust Pilot reviews definitely tell the same story. We fix everything here for our customers, we’ll optimize your website for Core Web Vitals — we’re your business partners and here when you need us most.

Our team of experts is standing by. Most website owners have switched hosting providers multiple times over the history of their site. We’re confident that you won’t look back once you make the switch to Rocket.net.

The best customer support 24/7, super fast speed, ease-of-use, and access to top tools and industry-leading resources should always come standard. We’re revolutionizing the way your WordPress site gets served up to the world, and we look forward to partnering with you in growing your business.