How I Built a Niche Review Site for Squishy Toys (and What I Learned About SEO)

I never thought I'd build a website about squishy toys. But here we are. A few months ago, I was looking for a Needoh stress ball — those slow-rise fidget toys by Schylling that have basically taken over TikTok. I wanted to compare a few products, check prices across stores, and figure out which one was actually worth buying. What I found was not great. A bunch of thin affiliate pages, copied product descriptions, and zero real information. So I built SquishGuide . The Stack I went with Astro for the framework. If you haven't tried it for content-heavy sites, you should. It ships zero JavaScript by default, which is exactly what a review site needs — fast page loads, great Core Web Vitals, and search engines love it. The rest of the stack: Tailwind CSS for styling (custom design system with squish-themed colors) Vercel for hosting and edge deployment TypeScript for the data layer Google Analytics 4 for tracking Schema.org structured data for rich search results Content Architecture The