The BIG Problem I Faced And How You Can Avoid It!

Today is the last day of the first month of SAC and I have to say that the SAC has gone off to a pretty good start, despite not having results to show for it.

I have over 40K words written since the start of the first month on April 10th and since I was on vacation, I was only able to publish 19 posts. Although I was able to meet the minimum of 12 posts for the month, my aim is to write a post everyday and unfortunately, I have not been able to do that since I came back.

But this is something that I definitely will work on going into Month 2 of the SAC.

I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself, and I'm trying not to be, because I found a big problem on my website that I've been trying to rectify at the same time.

If you don't know me, I've been with Wealthy Affiliate since Dec 2017 and my very first website was about the make-money-online niche and promoting Wealthy Affiliate. I'm going onto my 18th month here and my website has been horribly stagnant for a few months, instead of improving.

Although I made money, my big problem is that the number of monthly visitors is not improving. My bounce rate is not getting better. I'm not getting any better rankings as before although I pumped out more content and learned how to optimize my posts.

I had to dig into it to find out what was the problem and I finally did. I found out that the Sitespeed on mobile devices is REALLY bad, like in the RED! It rarely goes over 50 and for that reason, people are not waiting around to see my content, thus the high bounce rate.

When Sitespeed is not up to par and the bounce rate is high (mine are in the 80%), this affects rankings for your whole website, which translates to less visitors and less income.

Digging a little further in, I found this training.

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/turbo-charge-your-site-speed

It turns out that a big portion of this issue is related to images! Yes, although you have the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin, it's not enough! Follow this training and start optimizing your images from early on because there will be a heck of a lot of work for you if you wait.

I now have to optimize 1700 images INDIVIDUALLY for the 250+ posts on my website and that is going to be VERY time-consuming. You don't want to end up like me so take care of image optimization while you still can early on!

So although things have been going well, I still have this to do on my plate.. :( But on the other hand, I'm happy that I found out what the issue was and that it is something that I can rectify. It will take time, maybe a few months, but at least, it's a viable solution.

Thanks for reading everybody and I wish you all the best! All SACers, let's keep strong in Month 2 of the SAC.

Reyhana