My analysis on popularity and traffic of Sun Basket's website.

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Jacob Blair
Professor Jacquie Lamar
Intro to Web Publishing
18 September 2018
Sun Basket Popularity and Traffic Analysis
Web Site Overview
General Industry and Company Information
Overview: The meal kit industry in the most basic of terms is an industry that delivers pre-
packaged meals to individuals at their place of residence. Although, each company has a
different plan of action in how these meals are prepared and sent. The companies provide
consumers with different meal plan options to fit their desired needs. According to the article, 7
Organic and Healthy Meal Kit Delivery Services Breaking up Boring Dinner Routines, the meal
kit industry also has a focus on eliminating food waste that occurs when individuals go to the
store and buy the products to make the desired meals they want (The Good Trade). As this is a
new and expanding industry, sites are in competition currently the win the choice of consumers
that have or are turning to this food option.
The company that is being analyzed within the food kit industry is Sun Basket. Sun
Basket lives on the internet with the URL sunbasket.com. Above the fold on the homepage, Sun
Basket promotes the phrase “healthy cooking made easy.” Sun Basket includes meals to
purchase in two options, a consumers choose any meal or choose a certain meal plan. According
to Sun Basket, they offer 10 different meal plans that consumers can choose from. The meal
plans are Chef’s Choice, Paleo, Lean and Clean, Gluten-Free, Vegetarian, Mediterranean, Vegan,
Pescatarian, Diabetes-Friendly, and Quick and Easy. Sun Basket promotes that they want to

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“source organic produce 100% of the time.” They have two different menus, a classic menu and
family menu. No matter the meal plan, a consumer can choose any item off the menu, even if it
does not match the chosen meal plan. The classic menu includes everything Sun Basket offers
for the week, which is 18 different recipe options, and the menu options change each week. The
family menu only includes six options. The menus are separated because they price points are
different. The classic menu is $11.99 per serving, each recipe is two or four servings, and the
consumer gets three meals per week. The family menu is $10.99 per serving, each recipe is four
servings, and the consumer can choose between two, three, or four recipes per week. Compared
to other meal kit companies like Green Chef and Home Chef, Sun Basket is similar in options
and price to other companies. Sun Basket is more expensive, but has more options. Green Chef
has six different plans and are $10.99 per meal, a meal being one serving. Home Chef is $9.95
per serving, offer no categorized meal plans, but do offer 15 menu options to choose from.
Trust: The first item I looked at to determine the trustworthiness of Sun Basket is the Press
section of the site. There, they have listed 54 different stories written about the company. The
stories range from July 21, 2015 to July 27, 2018. This is important to look at because it shows
the company has been written about in well-known publications over a long period of time. All
the articles are not bunched up recently or bunched up three years ago. They are spaced over
time, so they are a company worth writing about consistently. Some of the news sources that
have written about Sun Basket are The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, USA Today, and the Los
Angeles Times. These news sources are well-known and show that Sun Basket is trusted by these
sources. The Wall Street Journal wrote about Sun Basket in 2015 and then again in 2018,
showing Sun Basket is worth the Wall Street Journal’s time. Adding to the trust of Sun Basket
they have the USDA Organic logo above the fold on the homepage, which shows the importance

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of displaying that to consumers. They also have a slide show of pictures of various farmers they
use for their products, allowing the consumer to view where the products are coming from. Then,
Sun Basket promotes Justine Kelly, an award-winning chef as one of the people making the
recipes for Sun Basket. This allows the consumers to trust an expert is creating the recipes they
are cooking.
Quality Content Assessment
Credibility: When looking at credibility it is important for a website to be well-written and free
of typos. Typos are simply any simple mistakes a website makes. To determine if a website is
free of typos, I used an online tool that would find them for me, SEOchat.com. I had the tool
look through 100 pages on the site and it did show some possible typos. Although, many of the
pages the typos were flagged, the page included the menus and recipes. Looking through the
pages, it is possible the tool flagged odd food names as the possible miss-spellings. Based on the
observations I made, I concluded that sunbasket.com is mostly free of typos, which adds to the
credibility of the site by showing the viewer it has been checked. Within credibility it is also
important for a website to be unique. In terms of a website, unique means that there is no other
content anywhere on the internet that is like the content on the website. Therefore, for Sun
Basket, the content on its website is not found to exist anywhere else. To check this, I used
another tool, Copyscape.com. Running the tool, I found that some of the content on Sun Basket
is in another location, therefore, it is not unique to Sun Basket. That being said, looking at the
sources in which the similar items appear, they are articles or blogs citing quotes off of the Sun
Basket website. Although the content is not technically unique, it did originate on Sun Basket
first. Therefore, after digging deeper into the possible issue, the concern does not affect the
credibility of Sun Basket’s website.

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Value: Sun Basket has put together a site that allows a possible consumer to spend time
researching on the site before they commit to purchasing. I went through and could read about
meal plans, check pricing, view menus options three weeks in advance, and learn about how the
service works all before having to give any information to Sun Basket. Sun Basket also provides
high resolution images of how the food will look once prepared which allows an individual to
see if the food looks good to them and not only sounds good to them. There is also a video tab
that includes many videos on various cooking techniques that are used in the making of their
recipes. All of these items provide a reason for consumer’s to stay and explore the Sun Basket
site. One item of the site that takes away value is there is no easy way to contact Sun Basket.
There is a Frequently Asked Questions page, but if that does not answer the question, there is no
phone number or chat option on the site. If contact with Sun Basket is needed an account has to
be set up before that could occur.
Competing Site: Homechef.com is one of the many competitors to Sun Basket. Home Chef
prices its meals at $9.95 a serving compared to Sun Basket at $11.99. While the food is cheaper
at Home Chef they have less options. Home Chef offers zero meal plans and 15 different meals
to choose from each week, while Sun Basket offers 10 meal plans and 18 meals a week. Another
difference between the sites is Home Chef’s menu is open five weeks out and the consumer can
order ahead if they desire, while Sun Basket is only three weeks out. Both sites promote green
packaging and only providing the necessary amounts of ingredients in the box to make the
desired meal. Looking at the two sites, my observations were Home Chef offers more meat
featured meals than does Sun Basket. What I mean by this is Home Chef has meat as the main
dish, while Sun Basket adds the meat to a wrap, salad, or noodle dish.
Popularity Analysis

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Definitions: In the data table below, I calculated the number of backlinks, referring domains,
and the average number of backlinks per domain. I calculated numbers for both SunBasket.com
and HomeChef.com. It is necessary to look at both so when analyzing the numbers from Sun
Basket, it can be determined if those numbers are good or bad. Backlinks are the number of links
to a site. In this case, backlinks are the number of links that link to sunbasket.com. A referring
domain is a website that has a link on it to a website. In this case, a referring domain is the site
that has a link to sunbasket.com. It is then important to calculate the average number of
backlinks per domain because analysis of how many of the links come from a specific domain
can determine the quality of the backlinks. If one domain has half of the backlinks total for a site,
it can be assumed that those back links are spam or fake. The lower the average number of
backlinks per domain is, the better it is for a website.
Total Backlinks Number of
Referring Domains
Average Number of
Backlinks per
Domain
SunBasket.com 19,900 904 22
HomeChef.com 30,400 870 35
Comparison: Starting with backlinks, Sun Basket has 10,500 less total backlinks than does
Home Chef, but Sun Basket has 34 more referring domains. That puts the average number of
backlinks per domain number in favor of Sun Basket. What this shows is it may be possible there
are a few number of domains that have a large number of backlinks. Therefore, there may be
some fake sites helping to boosts the total number of backlinks for Home Chef. Although, when
looking at the trends over time graph, over the last year, Home Chef had a quick spike from
October 2017 to March 2018, but the trend is now steadily downward. Sun Basket, has only
recently spiked over the last month or so, almost doubling the total number of backlinks. This is

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not necessarily a red flag, but is a concern that needs to be looked at and determine if the
backlinks are coming from quality referring domains.
Analysis of Link Quality: When looking at referring domains, it is important to analyze the
referring domains themselves and the number of backlinks with those domains. The number in
parenthesis for the next five domains are the number of individual backlinks associated with the
site. I checked these numbers September 11. I then went back and looked again on September 17
and noticed the total number of backlinks increased from 19,900 to 24,800 for Sun Basket. The
increase came in majority from one site, which is discussed in this section.
1.) California Certified Organic Farmers, ccof.org (CCOF) (67): This is a significant
referring domain because this is an organization that certifies the use of organic food.
Although, it would be expected that the CCOF would have backlinks to Sun Basket
because the two are partners, as Sun Basket has the CCOF logo on its site. That being
said, this is a semi-quality domain because it shows that the two are working together and
is a credible domain for Sun Basket to have.
2.) University of California Berkeley, Berkeley.edu (22): This is a significant referring
domain because it is a restricted domain. Having a restricted domain have backlinks to
Sun Basket is immediately determined as real and credible. This is a high quality link
because the University of California Berkeley is a respected educational institution that
would use Sun Basket for the right reasons.
3.) Paleo Grubs, paleogrubs.com (8,726): This is a significant referring domain because of
the sheer number of backlinks associated with this website. This one site accounts for
almost half of the backlinks total to sunbasket.com. Looking at the SEMrush report, this
site is labeled as “new”, meaning it showed up on the radar of SEMrush within the last

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month. Then, when looking at trends for Sun Basket, the backlinks almost doubled within
the last month. Therefore, most of the new backlinks all come from one site. This is a red
flag and is a concern for Sun
Basket. The site itself is for all different kinds of paleo diet recipes and seems more
towards a well-put-together blog. Although, in a matter of six days this site increased the
number of backlinks to 13,200. This site should be a major concern to Sun Basket.
4.) Doctor of Credit, doctorofcredit.com (1,093): This is another referring domain that is
significant due to the low quality domain that is seems to be. Again, it provides a high
number of backlinks. The Paleo Grubs domain at least discussed the same topics as Sun
Basket, while Doctor of Credit is a sight focused on banks and finance. That is where I
asked myself the question why would a credit site backlink to a meal kit site more than
1,000 times. The site itself looked poorly and quickly made and seems to be of low
quality.
5.) Rembrandt Venture Partners, rembrandtvc.com (84): This is a significant referring
domain because it is an investment firm. This looks to be quality because having an
investment firm linking to Sun Basket means it is a company someone believes will
succeed in the future. Rembrandt invests in other companies like DropBox. Although,
Rembrandt does have Sun Basket as one of the companies it invests in, so therefore the
link quality goes down a little because it is learned the two are business partners. It is
assumed the company investing in Sun Basket would want to lead people to the site they
are investing in, but at the same time, it is good because someone believes Sun Basket
will succeed in the future.

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Restricted Domains: Restricted domains are sites that have the .edu, .gov, or .mil as the domain.
Restricted domains can only be approved for use and secured by a company if they are approved
to own the domain. It is important to look at restricted domains in assessing the quality of the
domain because if a company has a restricted domain it almost automatically gains credibility.
This is because it takes a process to obtain the domain and the owner had to be approved by
another party. It is also immediately credible because the owner of the domain had to spend the
time and effort to get approved and the owner is not someone that made the site in a hurry. Using
the SEMrush.com report, Sun Basket has 28 backlinks and four referring domains from restricted
domains, Berkeley.edu, uwyo.edu (University of Wyoming), uthsc.edu (University of Tennessee
Health and Science Center), and lit.edu (Illinois Institute of Technology). This comes out to less
than one percent of the backlinks come from restricted domains, but Sun Basket does show
some. Home Chef has four backlinks from one .gov domain, Georgia.gov., and 55 backlinks
from four different .edu domains, Creighton.edu, uthsc.edu, tamu.edu (Texas A&M University),
and knox.edu (Knox College).
Authority: The authority score is a score provided by SEMrush.com and is calculated by using
the Domain Score and Trust Score that SEMrush gives a site. It then also takes into account the
number of backlinks, the number of referring domains, total monthly visits to the sites, and the
number of keywords on the site. Monthly visits are calculated using the number of unique
visitors to a site in a month. Keywords are words that bring users to a domain when using a
Google search. All of these are weighted to determine the “strength and popularity of the
domain,” according to SEMrush. The higher the authority score the better. Sun Basket has an
authority score of 50, while Home Chef has an authority score of 55. Analyzing these numbers,
SEMrush is determining based on their authority score that Home Chef has the better overall

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quality in its website. This might be the case because Home Chef has over 10,000 more
backlinks and although Sun Basket has the better average of backlinks per referring domain, it
does not make up for the backlink difference.
Traffic Analysis
Visit Analysis
I struggled to get similarweb.com to work, so for this section the data numbers come from
SEMrush. I bring this up because with what I could get from Similar Web is the numbers
between the two are similar but do show a difference. This is important because these sites are
providing estimates, and the sites are estimating numbers that are similar but different enough it
should be noted.
SunBasket.com HomeChef.com
Average Monthly Visits 788,000 2,333,000
Unique Visitors 433,000 1,500,000
Visits Per Unique Visitor 1.80 1.56
Definitions: A visit is the amount of times a user visited the site being analyzed during a specific
amount of time. A visit can also be referred to as a session. Each new session a user may have is
considered a different visit. The timeframe may be days, weeks, months, or years, but the
numbers default to monthly and that is what is analyzed here. A unique visitor is considered a
visit by a device. It is not referring to a person because a person can visit a site with two different
devices. For example, someone visits a site on their laptop, then on their phone, and then on their
desktop. That would be considered three different unique visitors, even though it was the same
person that visited the site. Visits per unique visitor is the amount of visits the same device uses a

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site within the timeframe, it being a month in this analysis. For example, someone visits Sun
Basket three times on their phone in the month, which is three visits per the one visitor.
Comparison: Home Chef has a much higher number of total visits, 2.33 million to 788,000.
Home Chef also has a much higher number of unique visitors, 1.5 million to 433,000. This
makes sense because if Home Chef has more visits it would be expected it have more unique
visitors. Although, the number of visits per unique visitor is in favor of Sun Basket. Sun Basket
has 1.80 visits per unique visitor to Home Chef’s 1.56. Both sites seem to function similarly and
offer comparable products. Although, the numbers show Home Chef is visited more frequently. I
went to Google and searched “meal kit delivery,” and after some ads and three news articles
Home Chef was the second meal kit company to be visible and showed up on page one. Sun
Basket was on page two. This could explain the difference in numbers. If Google is placing
Home Chef on page one of the search results, which is what researching consumers are going to
click on first, more people would visit Home Chef. This also explains why Sun Basket has a
higher number of visits per unique visitor. If consumers are truly interested in meal kit services
they will find multiple options to look at. Sun Basket may provide the more desired option for
the people that research and then they return to Sun Basket’s site.
Engagement Analysis
For the metrics in this section I again used SEMrush. Since, I used SEMrush for the previous
data, I want to stay consistent when comparing numbers.
SunBasket.com HomeChef.com Web Averages
Bounce Rate (%) 33.90% 45.31% 20-40%
Pages Per Visit 4.30 4.29 4.60
Average Visit Duration 5:09 1:40 3:10

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Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of users or visitors who visit the site and then leave
the site after only spending time on one page. The bounce rate for Sun Basket is 33.9 percent,
while the bounce rate for Home Chef is 45.31 percent. The bounce rate numbers lean in favor of
Sun Basket as the numbers show that Sun Basket has a fewer percentage of visitors that leave the
site after only viewing one page
Based on looking at both Sun Basket and Home Chef bounce rates, it looks as though
Sun Basket has a decent bounce rate. The average bounce rate for a retail site is 20 to 40 percent.
The bounce rate for a service site is 10 to 30 percent. I personally look at Sun Basket as both a
retail and service site. They are mostly a retail site because they are selling food, but they are
also providing the service of delivering pre-packaged food. Looking at those numbers, Sun
Basket sits close to the middle of the retail range and outside the service range. Based on the
retail range the bounce rate for Sun Basket is not bad, but it is not as good as it could be. This
may be because of what sits on the home page, above the fold. Without doing anything, the
visitor can see pictures of the food, a brief description of the options available in terms of meal
plans, and that Sun Basket is a certified organic produce handler. Where the issue may be is the
button that sits in the middle of the
page. The button reads “Get Started
Today,” while there is another get
started button on the top of the page
as well. First, this may tell a consumer there is a series of steps they must do before getting to
explore the product. Although the tabs at the top allow the visitor to explore, the two get started
buttons might push a user away. Another possible reason the bounce rate is where it is at is the

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homepage is so long. The homepage includes a wide array of information. A visitor visiting the
site can learn, explore, and get a good feel for what they are looking at without clicking on
another page. They can see how it works, a message from the chef, some of the farmers involved
with the food, and pictures of the food that they may be purchasing. If someone is doing an
initial browsing of a site, this is enough before they go look at another site. The user may return
later to look more, but the homepage holds the same information that is on other pages than the
homepage on other sites.
Page views Per Visit and Average Visit Duration: Page views per visit are the total number of
pages a user views before ending a session on the site. The number in the data chart refers to the
average number of page views per visit over the course of the timeframe looked at, in this case a
month. Sun Basket has an average page views per visit of 4.30. The competing site Home Chef
has an average page views per visit of 4.29. The two sites are practically the same, which is
interesting because so many of the other data points show differences. One thing to keep in mind
when analyzing these numbers is the visitors included in the bounce rate are also included in the
page views per visit. Therefore, the people that spend time on more than one page are actually
viewing more pages than the average of 4.30.
The average visit duration is the average amount of time a visitor spends on the site over
the course of the timeframe being looked, in this case a month. Sun Basket keeps users on the
site for an average of more than five minutes, while Home Chef keeps users on the site for barely
over one minute. This metric is drastically in favor of Sun Basket as they are able to keep visitors
on its site much longer than Home Chef.
Sun Basket’s page views per visit number is slightly lower than the average number for
the rest of the web and the number is almost identical to Home Chef. Therefore, Sun Basket’s

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page view per visit number is not alarming, but could improve. One of the reasons this number
may only be at 4.30 is one of the same reasons as the bounce rate. The homepage is long and
holds enough information people may feel as though they do not have to explore other parts of
the site to find the information they want. Although, the page views per visit is low, the visit
duration is well over the average for the web. This supports the idea that the homepage is holding
viewers’ attention and they are looking through it. Similarly to the homepage, the meal plan page
also includes a Frequently Asked Questions section. Many of the pages of Sun Basket include
more information than the title of the page. This may be why the visit duration is so high. There
are also an “explore” section on Sun Basket. This part of the website includes an area to explore
recipes, watch videos, and learn tips and techniques from Sun Basket. In contrast, Home Chef
does not have this section and its average duration time is much lower than the web’s average.
For someone spending time on the website, items like the one’s Sun Basket provides will hold
people on the website longer, especially if they are looking for items like this.
Engagement Improvement Recommendation: One idea that Sun Basket could do to improve
engagement on the site is provide an option for a free or at minimum discounted trial. As
mentioned in the Bounce Rate section, the homepage of Sun Basket includes two buttons for
getting started above the fold. The button on the top left could be changed to free trial.
The free
trial could be one
meal or one set of
meals. Although
this is a hit
financially to any company, I think adding this could keep people on the site and buying the

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product. Home Chef does not have this option and it could be the one thing that allows Sun
Basket to win the meal kit battle. First, the free trial button is more likely to be clicked on and
have people go through the steps for ordering. Second, if visitors know that they can get a free
trial they are more likely to spend more time on the site looking at meal plan options and the
menu. Another benefit of a free trial, is with something like meal kits, visitors might be skeptical
of the product and want to know how it works without committing any money. I would want to
know if the food tastes good, how big the meals actually are, and how easy they are to cook for
an unexperienced person in the kitchen. A free trial would answer all of these questions with no
commitment.
If Sun Basket has a free trial and competitors do not, someone contemplating the idea of
meal kits will be more likely to try Sun Basket. For example, although this is not within the same
industry, I was looking for a TV service for my apartment off campus. I decided to go with
streaming TV even though I was skeptical of it. I was looking at options like Sling TV, YouTube
TV, and Hulu. I liked YouTube TV’s options the best and wanted to try it, but was worried about
the functionality of it and had some questions about the DVR service. Although, they had a free
trial. Therefore, I went
ahead and gave
YouTube TV a try. I
explored the service
and found it to my
liking and now have had it for two months. If Sun Basket was to provide a free trial, they would
lose the money up front, but the visitor may enjoy the product and come back to the site to
purchase moving forward.

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Works Cited
“7 Organic & Healthy Meal Kit Delivery Services Breaking Up Boring Dinner Routines.” The
Good Trade, www.thegoodtrade.com/features/5-organic-and-healthy-food-delivery-
options-for-the-conscious-consumer.
“Clean, Sustainable & Always Delicious | Sun Basket Meal Kit Delivery.” Sun Basket Healthy
Meal Kit Delivery | Fresh Food & Easy Recipes, sunbasket.com/.
“Home Chef Meal Delivery Service, Fresh Ingredients to Cook at Home.” Home Chef,
homechef.com/.
Used SEMrush.com, copyscape.com, tools.seochat.com, and similarweb.com for metrics.