I’m feeling bogged down by my blog at the moment… Blogged down!
I started my blog to talk about positive parenting, share recipes, write about my life with kids, reviews, and really whatever struck my fancy. And, I am enjoying that side of it SO much. I’m also loving the blogger community – it’s more wonderful than I had ever expected it to be. I’ve made some amazing blogger friends whom I’m really grateful for. I also love having a creative outlet, developing my website and moving things around.
Initially, setting things up with WordPress was like learning Chinese. I had no idea what I was getting into! Widgets, plugins, permalinks, SEO, css, php…to just name a few. I literally had never heard of these things before I started my blog. So, in all fairness to myself I have learned a lot. And it’s a learning process every day with lots of stumbling blocks, realizations, panics, & solutions.
What I’ve learned this week is that I don’t have my images sized or scaled properly. And, if you are a regular to my blog, you know I have a lot of images. I just imported images from my phone, Canva & Shutterstock without any editing. I bet you experienced bloggers are cringing reading that lol So, I’m now in the process of trying to optimize my site – to make it load faster and work better. That’s something I didn’t consider or understand when I started my website (less than 2 months ago). I am looking at new optimization terms and having to learn a new language all over again, with google on hand.
A word of warning for anyone new and green like me, check out how your site is running before you go too far. I checked my site using GTmetrix. My score was horrifying. So, I’ve been editing images with PicMonkey and reimporting them into my site and deleting the original. I’ve only done a few because there just hasn’t been time. But by changing 8 images on my home page, my score & load time improved dramatically.
Yesterday I discovered a plugin issue…well, tech support told me that’s what was wrong. One of my plugins is eating memory. So I’m trying to figure out which one it is, but I really just don’t have the patience right now, so I turned the important ones on and left the rest off.
Sometimes it’s challenging to have time to write a post! I spend so much time trying to develop my site, using social media, joining linkies & commenting on other bloggers posts. That’s what blogging is all about but when is there time to write?! It’d be nice to have extra hours in the day or some people to do the housework for me lol I need to figure out a balance!
That’s my venting over. Thanks for listening! If you have any site optimization tips for me or advice for better blogging time management, I’d love to hear them! Thanks!
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