It’s time for another look back at my posts for the previous year and what y’all liked… and what fell flat. 2025 was a bit of a rollercoaster year for me. I struggled with Google updates and the changing partnership landscape. My skin grew thicker from ugly online trolls, and I reprioritized my time with work and family. Through it all though one thing remained–I still love creating content. In November I celebrated 15 years of blogging, and as I look forward to my 2026 goals it just makes me more excited to keep going. Today I’m sharing the top 10 blog post ideas from 2025 that performed the best on the blog. I’m also sharing my goals from last year and looking forward to the future.
blog post ideas that were a win in 2025
Here are the top ten posts that were published in 2025. Just a reminder that these are not necessarily my highest-viewed posts, because I still have several posts in the top spots that are several years old. However, out of all the blog posts I published in 2025, these were the ten with the most sessions.
blog post ideas #10-6
Coming in at the #10 spot is my review for the Yosemite Valley Lodge. This accompanied a bucket list travel item for me–seeing the Yosemite Firefall phenomenon that happens every winter! Yosemite Valley Lodge is not fancy by any means, but we would definitely stay there again for the convenience alone.
We did a lot of fun things on our summer road trip and one of them was attending an outdoor performance of The Wizard of Oz. I’m so glad my blog post review and Tuacahn Amphitheatre Tips is in the top ten!
My 8th most viewed post is all my tips for visiting Bishop’s Pumpkin Farm near Sacramento. Our family loves visiting this pumpkin patch–it claims to be the largest U-pick pumpkin patch in the world!
As a Get Away Today affiliate I always like to share the newest theme park deals so this year I wrote up all about the Universal Express Pass. If you’ve ever wondered what you get and if it’s worth it, you’ll want to check it out!
Since I noticed that Trunk or Treat pins always trend on Pinterest in the fall, I decided to write up a post with lots of ideas and tips for hosting your own Trunk or Treat. Y’all loved it and it was fun to look at the old pictures from past years of attending.
blog post ideas #5-1
This past summer I was a yurt leader for our church’s young woman camp so I came up with some devotional handouts for my girls. Of course, since I was designing them anyway, I decided to share them on the blog. Imagine my surprise that my girl’s camp devotional handouts came in at the #5 spot!
We only do “friend” birthday parties every other year, and last year we hosted three of them. Our movie night at home birthday party (where we screened Wicked, of course) was a lot of fun to plan and it made it to the fourth spot.
Our family loves our church’s semiannual General Conference weekend and those blog posts seem to do well. This year I shared a fun idea on the blog for General Conference weekend kits and it made it into the top three on the blog!
I always love when a national park post makes it into the top ten for the year. Our family’s review of Yavapai Lodge at the Grand Canyon made it to second place. It was such a great place to stay at the South Rim–especially if you have a four-legged friend with you!
My most-viewed blog post of 2025 is thanks to the Happiest Place on Earth. My blog post all about whether Disneyland or California Adventure is a better choice for your family made the to spot for the year! Let me know in the comments which one you prefer!
blog goals from 2025: looking back
Besides looking back to see what blog posts performed well, the main point of this annual blog post is too look back and see what goals I accomplished. Full disclosure–I didn’t reach all of my goals in 2025. But that’s okay! I still saw growth and had some fun partnerships. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t reach all your goals, see it as an opportunity to improve in the future!
- – Increase my pageviews by 50,000+ again. I saw massive page growth in 2024 and was hoping to have another huge leap in 2025. That didn’t happen. However, even after a tough year fighting against Google updates and learning to work with A.I., I did increase my pageviews by a little more than 10,000 so I’m going to call that a win.
- – Work on my YouTube channel. I proud to say that I did polish up my YouTube videos and although they’re still not up to par with a lot of other creators, I’m pretty proud of them! It’s important to remember that we’re all running our own race. I had also wanted to publish one video a month. Although I didn’t technically post one each month regularly, I still posted 10 videos total.
- – Build my Amazon storefront. My goal for 2025 was to upload one new idea list/image/video to my Amazon storefront per week. I definitely did not do that consistently, but I did add quite a bit to my storefront and got better about adding idea lists to my blog posts when applicable. From 2024 to 2025 I saw an increase in my Amazon income by 367%.
unexpected wins from 2025
There were some exciting things that happened in 2025 that I hadn’t planned on that I want to share!
- – I continued to slowly and consistently grow my newsletter while staying pretty consistent with sending it out.
- – Our family had some fun travel partnerships in 2025–including three during our summer road trip. One of them had been on my partnership bucket list for three years!
- – In 2025 I got invited to the Mediavine ad network! Honestly, once they raised their session requirement a few years ago I didn’t know if I would ever make it. However, I applied for their new Journey program in 2024 and based off of my blog performance in 2025 I got invited to the Mediavine program at the end of quarter three and I am very proud of that!
blog goals for 2026: looking ahead
I always like to start off January with refocusing my blog goals for the year. Thinking about what brings me the most ROI and what brings me the most joy helps me to prioritize what I want to work on each year.
- – 1+ YouTube video monthly. Since I didn’t quite make my YouTube goal, I want to work on that again in 2026. YouTube videos are great for evergreen content because they show up in search results online, so I think it’s good ROI for my time. Plus, it’s nice to have landscape content for my own personal family videos.
- – Instagram Stories every other day. It’s really hard for me to (1) remember to post Stories, and (2) be motivated to post Stories because Instagram shows them to such a small fragment of my audience. However, I do really want to continue to build community and I think the “real life” Story snapshots are a good way to do that.
- – Update 2 old posts a week. I want continue to increase my pageviews. The goal I have in mind for the year would mean getting another 60,000 sessions in 2026. Yikes. I think one of the smartest things I can do is really try to buckle down and get all old blog posts updated and SEO friendly by the end of the year.
What are some of your goals for the year?
