What if your blog disappeared tomorrow?
Don’t put all your recipes in one digital basket. Have a backup plan before things break.
It was a Sunday afternoon. I was elbow-deep in dishes when the thought hit me.
What if your blog went down tomorrow?
Not a dramatic hack. Not a permanent takedown. Just… poof. Server glitch. Plugin fail. Hosting issue.
Would you still have your content?
I’ve worked with food bloggers who have over 1,000 recipes, built over the years. Beautiful stories. Tested recipes. SEO-optimized intros. And most of it lives only on their blog.
Which means if the platform fails, the content vanishes. And with it: years of work, traffic, brand value, and trust.
It sounds extreme, but it’s not. I’ve seen it happen.
So what’s the backup plan?
It’s not just about having a Dropbox folder full of photos or a spreadsheet of ingredients. It’s about structuring your content in a way that protects its value.
Because when your recipes are structured properly—title, ingredients, steps, metadata, all clearly separated and labeled—they can be:
Reimported to a new platform with minimal cleanup
Licensed or syndicated to partners
Repurposed for smart devices, shopping apps, or new tools
Stored securely in multiple formats (and not just as a WordPress export)
Or just not lost, forever!
Meet Emma
Emma’s a food blogger who recently hit her 10-year mark. As part of her site rebrand, she decided to migrate her 1,200+ recipes to a new platform with better UX and mobile performance.
That’s when the panic set in.
Her old content wasn’t structured. Recipe cards were inconsistent. Instructions were merged into the body text. Cook times and categories were missing or buried. She decided to just add a popular recipe plugin to get everything in tip-top shape. Should’ve been easy, right? But what should have been a quick import turned into weeks of cleanup.
The good news? She didn’t lose her content. But she realized something important.
Content isn’t just what you publish.
It’s how you store, label, and protect it, because that’s what makes it portable and profitable.
Structured content doesn’t just protect your work. It increases its value.
The same recipe, when structured correctly, becomes a reusable asset.
Want to license a batch of recipes to a meal planning app? Easy, structured content can be transferred cleanly and even mapped to their system.
Want to pitch a retailer for a seasonal collection? Structured content makes it easier to filter, search, and organize your work by theme, ingredient, or occasion.
So if your blog went down tomorrow, what would you have left?
If the answer is “not much,” now’s the time to shift.
Start with:
Saving your recipes in a structured format (JSON, Airtable, Notion, etc.)
Breaking down each recipe into parts: title, description, ingredients, steps, time, etc.
Backing it all up outside your blog platform
I’m not here to scare you. I’m here to help you get future-ready.
Because your content is too valuable to risk.
Paid members get access to a structured recipe backup template to protect and repurpose your content on your terms.
In the meantime, tell me: What’s your current backup process (if any)? I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about protecting your content.
Your friend in food,
Sandie