Thank You Magistudios What A Difference

207 followers

5 years ago

I just wanted to give a quick shout out to magistudios, aka, Jay Neill for suggesting a theme that has made a phenomenal difference for my website performance.

Thank You, Jay, your always helping out and giving value to the WA community. No wonder your the first Wealthy Affiliate influencer, and I think I speak for everyone who knows you when I say, we appreciate what you do.

Beat, Broken, Going Nowhere Fast?

Here is what led up to me feeling compelled to give this shout out.

I have been working on my site for months, while I am moving slow and seemingly in the right direction, I have had several hiccups along the way that seemed important for me to address. Many of these left me feeling a bit discouraged because it was such a chore to find the solutions. Jay turned that around for me and you will see how as we continue.

A couple of those many hiccups that plagued me was site speed and mobile usability. Mobile speeds were consistently around 38 across the board, with desktop reaching up to 79 on some posts.

Now, I thought that I had done a good job researching and choosing a beginner friendly theme that had a decent free version. I put in the effort to find something worthy of my site and I eventually chose to use OceanWP, as many reviews and ratings seem to suggest this one was a winner.

To be fair, it's not an entirely bad theme and was rather easy to learn and the free version did come with most of the options I was looking for. I did eventually decide to upgrade to the premium version to gain the extra 21 features, but then later realized that most of them were not needed. Guess you just learn the hard way sometimes.

I coupled this theme with the Elementor page builder and was happy with the overall results. However, as my site content grew (and not by much), I noticed the same issues occurring over and over again.

Uploading URLs to search console was consistently giving me a mobile usability error and would only work after testing the live URL multiple times, Google Page Speed Insights was showing that my entire site (individual pages/posts included) were very slow on mobile and less than great on desktop for the majority, and I was consistently getting css, java, and font loading errors.

Now, I wanted to learn to code anyway as I feel that will help with my overall development in the years to come, however, I am still just getting started with that portion of this journey.

How in the world was I going to figure out how to solve these problems and still have time to work on my content? The short answer is, apparently, I wasn't.

Gave Up And Got Focused.

After countless hours of searching Google, Wealthy Affiliate, and everything I could find related to these issues, I was stumped. I managed to fix half of these main concerns, but the rest left me defeated. I was never able to solve the mobile speeds and font loading errors. I was also still experiencing problems with submitting URLs to search console, but only occasionally.

I had to install 3 separate plugins to solve those few problems, and while the returns were significant, the performance was still under par for what I felt was acceptable.

I finally gave up trying. I said the hell with it, I'm just going to get back to work and focus on continuing my training and try to catch up on some webinars by Jay. I frequently have to miss catching them live, so being able to go back at my convenience has been a great benefit to me, as I'm sure it is to others.

Back On Track At Lightspeed!

Luckily I made that decision and opted to start with Jays webinar on Creating a Beautiful, Professional Looking Website. If you haven't already seen it, you should check it out.

This is were Jay made the suggestion, that rid me of the headaches I was enduring from my current theme. He strongly reccomended Generatepress, and after watching, I immediately jumped over to my site to give it a try.

WOW!!!

All those tedious problems thrown right out the window, site speed pegging 100 on desktop and mobile for the majority, and no more loading or search console errors. I can't believe I didn't find this theme before.

Regardless, I am really glad that I changed over and so thankful that Jay pointed it out and gave that recommendation. Its easy to use, packed with everything I wanted from my previous choice and it's super fast.

So, if you're reading this, Thank You, Jay Neill, I really appreciate it and I'm enjoying the new theme. Now I can focus on what matters and continue my training with confidence, and stop worrying that my site is under performing due to speed and errors.