My New Fresh And Fast Q2 2014 Blog Updates (and new Plugins)

Posted in Empower Network, Hosting, My Journey, Testimonials, Webdesign, Coding & DTP

If you’re a regular visitor of my blog, you might have noticed the change of design a couple of times over the past few weeks.

A time table of theme changes …

2013 Q4 Responsive WordPress Theme

The temporary FREE design provided by Cyberchimps (I think it was Responsive) was not the way I wanted it to be. Moreover the Apple design-ish has been used too much by other sites.

2014 Q1 Experimental Themes

In Februari 2014, I switched to WordPress’ Twenty Fourteen. What I didn’t like though it’s quite ‘heavy’ on the server from a loading perspective and … cause it’s a wordpress default theme it gives the default look; it doesn’t stand out.

In March I worked on my new website: moneymakestravelfun.com as a replacement to rhyker2u.com … loved the theme so much that I actually purchased the wordpress equivalent as well (a hefty $40 for 1 theme; but it truly is beautiful). To only end up with loading times of 15-40 seconds! grrr; not good!

So to make the theme load faster I experimented with a bunch of caching plugins. The ones I liked most are Quick-Cache (by the creators of s2members) and a CDN-based solution called CloudFlare. Still … due to the complexity of bootstrap plugin and parallax effects, the loading times were horrific. Thus I switched back to a customised WordPress Twenty Fourteen.

Current 2014 Q2 Tiga

To be frank? I was really about to give up on the entire blogging adventure once more, when I ran into the clean and minimalistic looking WordPress Tiga Theme. Did require a bit of custom coding (as the support for the theme seems to be non existent, but I like the looks).

Pingdom benchmark shows a snappy 2.5-5 seconds loading time making this theme ~ 30-60% faster than most websites on the web; thus Google will love this! And this is without the usage of any caching plugins or CDNs! That I might still add later on.

Did remove all the fancy facebook fanpages, lightbox / modal window popups, banner advertising stuff, etc. Just keeping it clean from now on!

Update: yup, added & enabled quick-cache again with gzip modrewrite compression. Pingdom loading times from Dallas, TX, USA (a ‘problem’region) have gone from ~ 5-6 seconds to ~ 2.5-4 too now! Awesome!

New (FREE) WordPress Plugins

Due to a change / refreshment of projects, I needed to make a few changes to old content. Plugins that I found quite useful:

404 to start | create an alternate 404 page that doesn’t deminish my Google ranking and improves useability (displaying most read posts)
Disable Comments | to disable WP comments on pages (it’s still on at posts)
Infinite Scroll | my WP.com account is banned, thus couldn’t get JetPack to work. However ended up not using it, as I favor the clean minimalistic look of WP-pageNavi
OptinCrusher | free bottom bar synced with GetResponse
Update URLs | search and replace used URLs
WP-Optimize | keep the database clean of past post/page revisions

You might also like: Vimeo Plus Support: Groups vs Channel vs Albums

Like to know what other plugins I use? http://www.MyDigitalRolodex.com

Deleted a few blogs …

Because I’m so super happy with this solution, I cleaned up and deleted all my Blogger and Tumblr blogs. This might have an effect on backlinks, but I rather have everything go to this main blog. Oh .. and for those Empowered Bloggers? I left them too.

Moved site from subdomain to domain

Goodbye https://rhyker2u.blog/ and migrated everything to http://tell-a-few.com/about (as it once was in 2008). Reason? More useful for creating my own leadcapture pages, but also for increased Google ranking. Whitehat SEO trick so everything keeps forwarding correctly and indexed in Google? Basically doubling traffic? You need to remove all files and folders in the ‘old’ httpdocs / public_html and only create this .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://rhyker2u.blog/$1

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