Ninth year of blogging – Summary

The Poor Swiss in numbers

We will start our review of this ninth year with some numbers about the blog. As usual, we start with the page views.

For once, I have a full year of data on the same analytics system. We can see that the ninth year of blogging started significantly above the previous year but ended up significantly below for summer. It is good that we are above the previous year. I do not think we will ever go back to pre-AI numbers, though.

I do not have real data on it, but I have also seen that our rankings on Google have fallen very significantly. Many of my articles were in the first spot before, and now none of them are anymore. This definitely contributes to the lack of growth of the blog. The fact is that I am now competing with people doing that full-time, and some sites even have teams. It used to be a hobby for many people; now it is a job.

We can also look at the forum statistics.

The forum has been more active this year. But it has not been that active to reach 300k page views per month. In theory, the stats are excluding bots. But we can see that there are definitely some bots being counted.

Overall, I feel like our forum has been slightly more active this year. It is still not a hugely active forum, but there are some interesting discussions.

On the other hand, the engagement on the blog has been much lower. The blog reached 21,000 comments. This is only 2,000 comments in a year. There are now many days without comments (except for spam for sure). In the previous year of blogging, there were 3,000 comments (and the year before that, 2,000). So over two years, comments were divided by two. I still do not know why or what to do about them. This is a bit sad.

The blog now has 610 articles published, most of them translated in French and German. Except for two days (and the winter holidays), I was able to stick to my routine of one article a week.

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

What went well?

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

I still get positive feedback from readers, by emails and comments, about the usefulness of the blog. This is important because this is the main goal of the blog. I am glad when people tell me my content has helped them start investing or even simply improve their finances.

Overall, writing went well. Some articles are more enjoyable than others to write, but writing new articles for the blog is still something I really enjoy. I wish I could write more, but one article a week is the best I can achieve. I sometimes run out of ideas, but then some new ideas pop up on my radar, and so far it has not been an issue.

I also enjoy working on the comparators and tools. Very few people use them, but it is fun improving them.

Overall, balance was decent this year. I could not do as much as I wanted, but this was only for new projects. I could always handle the necessary tasks, and except for a few emails that I answer slower than usual, I did not feel pressure for the standard tasks.

In late 2025, we had a nice lunch meetup in Fribourg. It was fun to meet some readers again. I will try to organize one more this year. 

What did not go well?

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

The translation of the e-book to German went smoothly. But the results are not good. We were thinking this would make a nice increase in the volume of e-books sold, but it did not make any difference. So this was not worth the time and money we invested in this translation.

The YouTube experiment did not go well. I am not enjoying doing the videos nearly as much as I enjoy writing the articles. And it takes much longer to produce them than I would have wanted. I unfortunately reached a point where I do not have time to do more videos. I will complete this initial set of videos and then likely stop this experiment.

Finally, I am a bit disappointed by the growth of the blog and especially about the decrease in engagement. If my content is less engaging, it needs something else to improve. I also wish I could update my articles more frequently and keep my Google rankings, but I cannot really compete anymore with other websites in this niche that do that as their job or even have teams.

What changed during this ninth year?

We can look at what changed about the blog.

As already mentioned, our e-book is now available in German. We did an automated translation to start with, and then we hired a professional reviewer to make sure this was decent since neither my wife nor I is good enough in German to do a thorough review.

I worked on some calculators this year:

1. I introduced a brand new FI planner. The idea of this calculator is to help you plan your financial independence. This calculator will cover both the accumulation phase and the withdrawal phase. I am pleased about how it turned out.
2. I also wrote a calculator for the individual taxation change. This was also fun and quite useful given the future change to individual taxation.
3. I also added many more features to the advanced FIRE calculator. You can even do Monte Carlo simulations now.
4. The calculators are also often integrated directly into the articles to make the articles more interactive.

I had a technical issue with one of our plugins that wasted hours of my time. So, I decided to review them all to limit our dependency and the potential for breakage. With some work and extra code, I could get rid of four plugins. I only have five plugins left at this point. All the remaining plugins are necessary for this blog.

I added an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for my servers and for my computer. This protects against data loss when the power is cut. This extra protection plus our solar battery, and we have good confidence in the power in our house.

I did a lot under the hood to secure our systems. Now that AI is becoming more prominent, it becomes even more important because AI agents give hackers even more capabilities. I also replaced several servers that had aging hardware. And I reviewed our backup capabilities to make sure we have something resistant. This is not something you will see any differences on your end, but this is something important for the long term.

Overall, the blog has mostly stayed the same with some small improvements and new articles.

Most popular articles

I usually like to look at the most popular in terms of page views. This gives an idea of what is popular on my blog. This does not mean these are the best articles, but these are the most viewed of this last year of blogging.

Unfortunately, Cloudflare only keeps 30 days’ worth of analytics. So, here are the five most viewed articles of this past 30 days:

• Updated Trinity Study
• Best Joint Bank Account
• Interactive Brokers Review
• Saxo Bank Review
• Finpension 3a Review

The article about the Trinity Study has been very popular for many years. And apparently my reviews are also quite popular. However, a 30-day window is not really useful because it will overly represent articles that just got started this month. I could think about bringing back long-term retention, but this is not great for  the privacy of my readers, so I would rather get something minimal even if it means I have little data to work with. So I will likely simply save the data on my own system with only an aggregate view per article.

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

The next year of blogging?

Finally, we should look at what I have planned for the next year.

And honestly, I do not have much planned! The last few months, I have come to realize that I am already stretched thin. Now that my son is at school and my wife started a new degree as well, time is scarcer than ever. Additionally, the new house is also taking more than the old one. I am not complaining; this is normal, but I need to plan accordingly.

I have to continue the modernization of my hardware setup. First, I have one more server to redo. All components on this server are about 13 years old and need a refresh. With that, all our infrastructure will be in a nice place.

In the same idea, I want to have a backup solution for the server running the blog. If it fails, the blog will likely be down for a while, so I need something that can be started quickly if need be. I plan to complete that project in the next year of blogging as well.

I currently do not have any ideas for calculators, but I hope to add more to the list. Even though they are not used much, I enjoy working on calculators.

Finally, I really need to refresh some articles. If I want this people to regain some of its growth, I will have no choice but to make sure that some of my articles rank again on Google. I do not have the resources to work on link building like some of the other blogs in the niche, but I can at least try to improve some articles.

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 blog has continued its trajectory downward for the engagement. The blog is still helping people, but fewer and fewer each year. I was also less active on the blog and could not bring new projects to fruition.

That being said, I managed to write many new articles. I also improved my calculators and even added two new calculators. I also improved many things under the hood.

For the next year, I want to complete open projects and avoid starting new ones for the year. I would like to consolidate my existing articles, keep writing new articles, and continue providing value to my readers.

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