Eighth year of blogging – Summary

The Poor Swiss in numbers

As usual, we start our retrospective of the eighth year of blogging with some numbers about the blog. We can start with the page views.

The graph is different this year. Indeed, I have switched once again to something new for stats. In August 2025, my Plausible stats got broken again, and I did not want to fix them once more. So, I switched to Cloudflare Web Analytics. In the process, I lost two months of data, so they are flat (copied from the previous months). And then, since the stats are counted differently, it appears that there is a slight swing in September, but this is because the stats are very different.

We can see that we are still way behind 2024. I do not know why this is the case. It is a bit concerning. I am sure many lost views are due to AI answering the questions without people having to come to the blog. But still, I do not think this is the only reason.

So far, I do not have many stats for the forum itself since I started tracking views only in June.

I also have some statistics from Xenforo:

Overall, the forum is stable. I wish I could find a way to make it grow, but so far at least it is still being used. And since it is self-hosted now, the costs are really low.

Now that I have switched to Cloudflare Web Analytics for the blog, I will likely also do it for the forum. It makes sense to have the same stats for both my properties. And it is much better for my readers to have a privacy-free stats approach. I hope to do that in the next few months.

The engagement on the blog was lower than usual. The blog reached over 19,000 comments. In this last year, there were about 3,000 comments. This is significantly lower than last year, with 4,000 comments. Maybe my articles were less engaging than previously. I still answer all of them, and I believe there is value for the comments for the community.

As for the articles, there are now 563 articles in English, 429 in French, and 420 in German. I was able to stick to my routine of one article a week (on Tuesday). All new articles are on the three languages; the discrepancy is from some older articles that were not worth translating.

For some comparison, you can read the summary of the seventh year.

What went well?

We should first talk about what went well with The Poor Swiss.

Based on everything I hear back from my readers, the blog is still meeting its goal of helping people with their finances. I am thrilled about that, and it feels good when I get some thanks back from people having turned their finances around or even simply started investing.

I finally took on the translation of the e-book to French. This had been requested for a while. It was a lot of work, but less than I expected. It is good to have the e-book in two languages now. In the short term, it is not really worth it money-wise, but if it helps more people, it is good. And then, it may make sense in the long term.

Writing also went well this year. The Tuesday schedule for my article is still working well. I was late by one day once, but the article got written. Last year, I thought I was running low on article ideas. But it turned out well for the eighth year of blogging. I currently still have enough ideas for the next few months. We will see how it turns out.

Overall, except for a few months (see below), I had a good time on the blog. I am motivated to work on the blog, and I am especially motivated again to grow it (even though I do not know how). Even though we are not doing much on that aspect, the income of the blog is good. We should focus on expenses because we are spending too much (we are easier on the company’s money than on our own).

I also had fun this year writing new comparators and calculators. This is something fun for me because it mixes code and finances.

I finally got to organize a meetup for the blog readers. We had a nice time in Fribourg in December 2024, and we even did it again in April 2025. After that, with the new house, I did not have an opportunity to organize another one.

What did not go well?

Then, we should also discuss what did not go well with The Poor Swiss.

This year, we tried to go back into social networks. Currently, we are back on Facebook and LinkedIn. Neither of these are working really well, considering the effort. We are probably not doing a fantastic job, but at least we are back on it. I think we can get traction on LinkedIn, but I am not convinced about Facebook at this stage.

We had a small legal scare this year because of a misused image. Removing the image was easy, but we then realized that we needed to clean the images on the blog. We removed a ton of images from the blog. Unfortunately, with WordPress, there is no built-in way to fully remove these images. So, we had to use a plugin for that and make sure all the images were fully gone. Additionally, this made us realize our backups were not that great since we were missing an image. The good news is that we have greatly enhanced the state of the images on the blog, and this led us to improve our backups.

At the beginning of this year of blogging, I tried to start TikTok for the blog. At the beginning, I was quite motivated but then lost momentum. My goal (possibly stupid) is to grow the blog through videos and social media. Since we could not add links into TikTok videos, I felt it was not working the way I wanted. But at least I gave it a try and may go back to it at some point.

There was at least one month when the balance was totally off for the blog. In general, I manage to keep a good balance because there are not many emergencies, and I cut on many things when small things happen. But when big, urgent things happen, I have very little margin. And then I have to make choices between the blog, the job, the family, and other responsibilities. Fortunately, it then got better. And we have taken steps to be more prepared, but it is impossible to know what will happen.

What changed during this eighth year?

We can look at what changed about the blog.

One technical thing that changed this year was switching to self-hosting the forum. Since the forum does not yet have much traffic, I decided to host it myself. Since I already host the website myself, I can take on the forum as well. This was costing us 60 USD per month. So, we are saving 720 USD per year by doing that.

I also improved the security of all my servers and significantly improved our backup situation. This is another technical change that users should not feel but is important for the long term.

Another thing I was forced to do was to redo all the graphs on the blog. This started with a WPML bug (not the first, not the last) that was getting confused when translating a graph with some symbols. This resulted in partial translation. I finally tracked it down and reported it to WPML. As usual, they did not do anything, so I took matters into my own hands and found a workaround. The problem is that I had to redo all the graphs from the blog to use the new system. And since I also had some outdated graphs on the blog, I refreshed them. This will make any future updates to these articles much simpler.

I also had time to write many new tools:

• A bank comparison tool to compare and find the cheapest bank for your needs
• A credit card comparison tool to optimize your credit card for your situation
• A third pillar comparison tool to find the best 3a for your needs
• A second pillar calculator to check if a second pillar contribution is worth it
  • Also did the same with the third pillar calculator
• A lump sum or pension calculator to compare these two options when withdrawing from the second pillar

It was a lot of fun to write all these tools. This is something I really enjoy since I get to do some coding. I hope I will have more ideas in the future to do something better. I am thinking of doing some advanced financial independence simulations as well. Some more complete FI simulations tied to Switzerland should be useful for my readers.

Most popular articles

We usually look at the most popular articles of the year on my yearly review. Unfortunately, I broke the stats and got rid of them before I could collect this information. So, we will have to look at the most popular articles of September only. I use page views as a measure of popularity. It does not mean it is the best article; it only means it is the article that has been the most read.

So, here are the five most viewed articles of September:

1. Updated Trinity Study
2. Best Third Pillar in Switzerland
3. Interactive Brokers Review
4. IB Fixed or Tiered Pricing
5. Pilla 3a Review

Apparently, content about Interactive Brokers is very popular. I am glad the Trinity Study article is the first one since it is an article I am particularly proud of. I am glad to see one of the latest articles made it into the top five as well. Indeed, older articles generally make it difficult for more recent articles to rank.

Hopefully, I will not break the stats again for the ninth year of blogging. A single month is not really representative.

What about you? What was your favorite article this year?

The next year of blogging?

Every year, I try to think about what I will do with this blog for the future year.

I think I will finally translate the e-book into German. This is not really to drive more revenue because the English version sells much better than the French version. But I prefer having everything translated to have a seamless experience for all my readers.

In the past, I thought about translating the website to Italian, but seeing how the French and German versions are already not doing so well, I do not think this is worth my time at this point. So, the translation to Italian will have to wait at least one more year.

In the past, I have tried TikTok videos. I still believe that there is value in videos for my blog and community. But I think that going on YouTube will be better. I want to try to do some simple videos and see how it goes. Please let me know in the comments below if you have any advice for me.

One thing I must do this year is continue working on the security of my services. I want the infrastructure to be resilient to a ransomware attack, for instance. No infrastructure can be 100% safe, but I need to bridge some gaps. I have already done a lot to bridge the most important issues I could find. The next step is to consolidate it entirely. I will also migrate the blog to a new server, which will improve performance and security. But there are many small steps before that.

I want to try to organize another small meetup in Fribourg in the next few months. I wish I could have done another one earlier, but it was not possible with everything that was necessary for the new house.

Finally, one thing I would like to think about is the home page. Currently, it is a fairly standard blog homepage with mostly the latest articles. But currently, the trend is to make home pages more about the blog than about the articles. The blog would look more professional with that. However, on the other hand, I am not a huge fan of these home pages, so I am a bit torn. Please let me know what you would prefer.

Your perspective?

This blog is for you! I would like to get your standpoint on this blog!

What do you think I should focus on next year?

What do you think went well or did not go well during the eighth year?

Do you have anything you would like to have on this blog? Any suggestions for articles?

Conclusion

Overall, the eighth year of blogging was less active than in the past. The blog is still doing well and helping people, but I want to find new ways to grow its audience. The blog now has new comparators and better tools. Several technical things have changed under the hood.

The next year should be more active, I think. I have a few projects for the blog that I hope to be able to implement. I have a few technical things to improve as well. And I still intend to continue to write one article per week, answering comments, forum threads, and emails as usual.

What do you think of my blog? Do you like the direction it is going in?