My theme incident nightmare!

Hello WA family. Sorry, I haven't posted in a while although I should be doing it as part of the SAC and as a result, my ranking at WA dropped. Well, the reason is that I had a nasty theme problem to take care of.

If you haven't read my previous post describing what was happening, here's a recap.

Basically, I had a free theme that I really, REALLY liked from when I started my MMO website back in Dec 2017 and it worked really well all through 2018. At the beginning of 2019, things were going so well, that I even expected to hit 4 figures at the end of June, which sadly didn't happen because in April, things started going downhill.

Traffic as well as referrals were going down.

I went from having 48 referrals in February to only 9 in June. I didn't even have any new sales for 3 months, which was even worse! I thought I was going good... :(

From March to April, I didn't know that I was on such a severe decline because I still made some sales, and even though I was on vacation, I still worked on my website and I was happy to get accepted into the SAC at that point too.

But the downward trend continued, even if I put more effort and started publishing everyday. I did some research and found that my images could be the issue and I started optimizing them one by one.

Little did I know that it was all the theme! It was categorized as mobile-friendly so I didn't think it was the theme from the beginning. I came to know that because even though I was optimizing my images, it had almost no impact on the loading speed of my pages.

So I got a premium theme and prayed that things would get better. My page speeds did get better but not my traffic nor my referrals!

My daily visitors was around 100 - 120 back in Feb and I was hoping to get back to that, but after the theme change, it went down to 40 - 50 per day! That really got me worried. After a couple of days, I did some research and found out that it could take a few months to go back to normal or to improve.

Again, I crossed my fingers, worked as hard as I could, even posted more regularly on my Youtube Channel and after almost 2 months of hard-work, I believe that it is getting better. I'm already doing better this week than I did last week.

My posts are more targeted and I'm getting referrals with WAY less traffic than I had before, so that's gotta be a good thing, right?

I'm already at 18 referrals at halfway through July, which is double what I had last month, and there is still more days left. I feel pretty good about this come back... :)

It's probably going to take a few more months to go back to normal or to surpass the 100-120 visitors I had per day back in February and March but I know that it will happen. This is a major setback in my plans but it's not impossible to overcome.

There were other positive results that I have to report, and it's the fact that I now have over 300 subscribers to my email list and over 40 subscribers to my Youtube Channel, 31 of which subscribed in the last month! It's so exciting!

Watch-time and views have gone up drastically and I'm hoping that this is going to continue. I've never stuck as long with anything as I have with Wealthy Affiliate and I'm really intending to make it work!

Thanks for all your encouraging posts in the past couple of months. Reading them really kept me going, even though I so wanted to give up and start a new website. But the little voice in my head told me "if I didn't take care of it and the same happened with my new website, I would have had no idea how to rectify it, right?".

I'm so happy that this is ove with and I'm now able to come back to the community and contribute once again.

Thanks for reading and I send you hugs and kisses!

Reyhana