Mountoria

exploring
|Started Sep 2015|Updated Aug 2026

Live since 2015, Mountoria addresses the topics of mountainbiking and Canada for a German-speaking audience. Started as a niche WordPress blog, it quickly gained traction. Currently being evaluated for a pivot.

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What it’s about

Founded in 2015, Mountoria addressed the niche of mountainbiking topics and travel planning for mountainbike trips to Canada, for a German-speaking audience. It gained significant traction with its mix of travel planning information, brand/manufacturer and rider data, as well as content like video links, media coverage and link collections. The website/blog won some prizes and honorable mentions, which led to partnerships and collabs — and, for me as the owner, a network and my first steps into the cycling industry.

The main thing that attracted readers were tips and tricks about traveling to Canada with a mountainbike: pricing information, trip distance calculations, packing tips, as well as area information up to manufacturer coverage. On top of that, well-researched, on-point information about Canadian cycling topics (brands, riders, regions and more).

Being a team of one, it was never my intention to run Mountoria as a news outlet chasing the latest updates first.

Mountoria took part in some competitions and won prizes and honorable mentions. Its purpose was always to extend reach with valuable information and connect with the community.

With the overall decline of blogs (exceptions apply) and private time constraints as a solo editor/founder/maintainer, the project paused after a few years and is currently in exploring status to figure out a pivot.

Learnings

360° ownership of a web project: tech, editing, marketing, SEO, design, maintenance, legal…

  • WordPress: maintenance, security, hardening — updates, plugin hell, repairs and fixes, the classic editor, migrations, PHP versioning, hosting, database issues, repairs, rollbacks, hackers and script kiddies, and a few more. I’ve been there.
  • templating and theme extension in the pre-AI era — hand-coded, lots of research, old-fashioned PHP, HTML, CSS, JS, etc.
  • writing a blog, talking about it, marketing it, agency contact, community questions and reader support
  • legal, GDPR compliance and the tech solutions behind it, spam handling, hackers, bots and script kiddies
  • SEO, growth, community management
  • monetization (at least enough to cover server costs)
  • newsletter management: from setup to writing to maintenance