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The Wargame Explorer has always been a website that is dedicated to learning new things, trying new games, and being my own personal exploration of the wargaming community at large. But recent issues, predominantly with the way that Google algorithms deal with hobby websites, have caused me to take a step back and reevaluate the way that I write.

Laying all our cards on the table, the situation is this: the Wargame Explorer has largely been a website that is led by organic traffic–that is, search traffic. People type into Google “What is the Best Space Marine Legion in Warhammer 40k?” and my website would pop up. And for a long time that was great.

But in September of 2023 Google launched something called the “Helpful Content Update” which changed the algorithm and the way it looks at websites. And–my traffic has been cut by 70% since then.

This has been frustrating, as you can imagine. I’ve been building The Wargame Explorer for close to three years now and to see it as a successful and popular site dropped down to a middling husk of what it was at its peak has been hard.

So, What Is Changing?

I’m changing things. And lest you think I am changing things to better chase the algorithm, I am not. I have decided that I don’t know what the algorithm wants and I can’t read its mechanical mind. So I’m going to make the website the way that I want to make it. It will be a more personal, more one-on-one look at my hobby through miniature wargaming is going.

Because make no mistake: this is tied so inextricably with my enjoyment of the hobby that when the website started to tank I could hardly bring myself to paint. And it’s not because I wasn’t getting clicks–it was because I took so much pleasure in miniature wargaming itself that I didn’t look at it as a business. It was all part and parcel of the website: the painting, the gaming, the writing of the blog. And when it felt like one of the legs of that stool was being removed, the rest of the hobby started to crumble.

And it has not been fun. I have really missed the enjoyment that I have gotten from this hobby, but it has felt like I have been desperately seeking for answers to chase that algorithm that I haven’t been trying to better my painting skill or my gaming. Heck, I’m going to be releasing a game here in the next few months–a game I wrote and built all by myself–and I’ve hardly been able to write about it.

What Will The Wargame Explorer Look Like?

I’ve had a long talk with my wife, who is not just my best friend but also my business partner in this venture. And this is a conversation I’ve been afraid to have because a big part of me has felt like I am a failure: this website had rapid growth for the first two years, growing from 0 to 119,000 hits a month, and now it’s in the gutter again. And my wife has said over and over again “Don’t ever give up on the blog” and I didn’t want to, but the joy was gone. But what I failed to understand was that when she was saying “Don’t ever give up on the blog” she didn’t mean that we needed the money, she meant that I needed an enjoyable creative outlet, something that I’ve built with my own two hands.

So after talking I’ve decided on the following:

• This has always been the long game. Anyone who works in SEO (and I do work in SEO during my day job) will tell you that SEO is not something that you’re going to do in a week or a month or six months. It’s going to take a long time. So, if it took my two years to get from 0 top 119,000 hits, then there’s no reason to think I can suddenly just jump back up to that high number. It’s the long game.
• The website has to be fun. This is, first and foremost, before worrying about revenue, a blog about my hobby and my passion: miniature wargaming. And if I’m not enjoying my hobby, then there’s no good reason for what I’m doing here.
• The blog is going to be personal. The world has changed in the last ten years from a blog-centric world to a social media-centric world, and there is less interest in going to a specific person’s blog to read their personal thoughts. But that’s what I’m good at and that’s what I do. And if that doesn’t bring me the clicks that’s okay. (As a sidenote, a very old friend, Steve Coles, wrote recently on his design company’s departure from social media to say: “Whenever I see another bright young talent who is building their thing entirely on a platform like Instagram, I want to shake ’em and say “You will regret this later!” I get it. This is where the eyes are right now, but it’s not worth handing the keys to your future over to Meta. Put it on the web! Free site-building tools are more plentiful, powerful and easier to use than ever. The first phase may be a struggle, but it’s more rewarding to make something you truly own and control–using web standards–than to constantly feed a megacorp’s closed network and bend to its unpredictable demands.”)
• I need to focus on my mental health. I’ve written about my mental health on this website (see here and here) but I have too much anxiety and depression built into my system to be in a constant race to chase the brass ring. I have always, for at least as long as I’ve been publishing (the past 21 years) always been running a side hustle aside from a day job. And sometimes that side hustle becomes the day job (I wrote full time for six years) and sometimes that side hustle goes nowhere. But I no longer have the spoons to have a dozen irons in the fire. If I’m going to be writing this website, it’s going to be on my own terms.

Immediate Plans

So what is going to change here in the near future?

• I am going to publish my game. I’ve talked about this a lot. This game is awesome and I think you’ll love it. And I’m going to be publishing it for free to anyone who wants it. This will happen sometime in the month of April or early May.
• I’m going to be writing a lot more, but a different, more personal kind of writing.
• I’m going to start having more fun with this hobby again.

I hope you’ll join me for the ride.