Debris, or Treasure
As we get started in this website building and blogging we work so diligently. We pick a theme that pleases our eye. We alter this and tweak that, we get comments and feedback from our associate friends within the community, and perhaps tweak more according to their advice. We fill it out with content. It is a thing of beauty. We are pleased. Perhaps proud even. We do everything we can to keep rankings and traffic and publishing frequency. And as advised we save a copy, downloaded somewhere safely.
The last time I saved the site was 18 days prior. In that save everything looked perfect. I was very happy with the way it looked and was filled in to that point.
I have run into so many glitches along the way. Pictures that won't load, ads that won't fit the widget. Zero traffic for a long time. Posts to Facebook the have gray man, a d the video walk through tutorial that looked simple and straight forward didn't work for me I had to go about it with much more digging. I finally get it. An attractive Facebook link from my "like page" to my site.
Then it happened. Within the hour of my Facebook link.
The update. I'm not sure if it was theme, or WordPress, or what exactly it was. I didn't save a copy immediately before hand. But what I thought was just going to tweak performance and security made a wonky mess of my site.
The theme font size changed. This threw off the entire framework. Pictures got stretched. Amazon store widget is popping out of its frame. The nicely formed footer is all, stretched and messy. Comments look a mile long and there are big gaps between them.
It looks like a pile of garbage. My whole site became debris. I was so frustrated and disappointed. Now to fix it.
I still haven't figured this out. The saved file won't import. A new theme won't accept more than 5 pages from my dozens on file.
But here is the treasure of this mess. My traffic yesterday went up! Not so great when my site looks so unprofessional. But my traffic went up.
Not only that, but Google analytics, and Google search console, had shown previously, 96 items submitted to index. And only 7 were actually indexing. And now, as I just checked ten minutes ago. Now 88 of the 96 items are indexing.
I don't know what I've done or how it happened. More unsettling is the idea that I now have to go and create a new framework on a new theme. Followed by a HTML page by page transferring and repositioning of photos, and links to the new theme.
Treasure, I've gotten most of it indexed. Treasure, I am off of my patrol job for the next 3 days. Treasure that I have confidence to tackle this Instead of throwing in the towel. If I knew how to tweak the original theme again that would be a treasure too. But, here I am awake before 7am on what equals my Saturday of a long weekend, a Tuesday to the rest of the world, and I am eager to get this done.
I can hope that by submitting so many articles in a short time will boost my site further.
Praying that everything goes smoothly. Praying that the technical difficulties were connected to that theme. And praying for Google's quick acceptance of this growth and change.
Any cheers, advice or support will be welcome. I love this community. We are all here for the greater good. None of us are here to tear others down. Its a good place. This place and these people are a true treasure.
Recent Comments
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Respect to you, Kaemoo!
Maybe you should contact Wordpress themselves and tell them what happened after the update......
Maybe they weren't aware of some small glitch that the update would cause for one of the themes?
Can relate your frustration, we all do encountered some kind of problems from time to time. Regards Sadie.
Cheer up, the upside is that you did not lose everything. It is a lot of work to redo, but you do have a positive side which is great.
Oh Harvey, thank you. I do see the bright side of this. Perhaps a lot of my technical difficulties may have been related to the functionality of that theme. As attractive as it was, I have another one now that I am tweaking. Once I uploaded the parent theme, and child theme for Origami, and Origami Green.. The rest of my site appeared. I had tried transferring the files half a dozen times. I have found in this life I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but rather Both. A happy place in the middle called a realist. Think of the worst case scenario, and the best case scenario, and reality is usually somewhere in the middle.
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I got my site back up and looking mostly alright. I am transferring pictures from all of my sources into my laptop so I have access all in one place. (not fond of the cloud) and then I will try tweaking in the lead photo within the header. I really want my backpack in there as I use that pic for all of my social media sites. It tells me it is the wrong size. I WILL make it fit.
I have to tweak ad links, and internal links and it will be as good as new. maybe even better.
I am happy with the results so far. Thanks everyone for your helpful and supportive comments.