In this post I am sharing with you my reasons for my website makeover and what has changed.
As most business owners with a website know, it is not easy to get seen on the internet. This is especially true for those of us with a very small business and a limited budget. I can’t afford spending tons of money on ads, plus ads don’t necessarily convert. My website has no ranking, my traffic is poor and furthermore I have noticed that the site speed wasn’t very good. A slow site speed means less engaged users. Nobody wants to wait ages for a website page to load. My website was also not that mobile friendly. Then there is SEO itself which needed improvements. So, I hired my trusted friend Pippa from “Pippa’s Web” to help me with the huge task of making significant changes to the website. Pippa has helped me in the past with this website and also redesigned my tuition website last year which you can find here.
So first we checked the site’s speed. You can do this with free websites such as Gtmetrix. The site speed wasn’t great with a score of 61.
Clik here to view.
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Changing the website layout.
I was contemplating a complete redesign by using a different theme, but decided against it as the theme (Virtue by Kadence) I have works fine, once you know how to use the various things it offers. I also noticed that it gives you the option to slightly change the layout. To explain the changes, I have included screen shots from the old website, which you can see above.
The old website’s layout had no sides and it went across the screen. So, I changed that to narrow the screen. It’s not a big change and rather subtle. Pippa suggested to make the logo smaller, so we did that too.
Changing to Guttenberg editor.
She also convinced me to switch from classic editor to Guttenberg. This took me some time to get used to and to learn how to work with blocks and headlines. This post is also written in Guttenberg.
We made minimal changes to the home page text, but used animal jewellery as the focus keyword to rank for. I don’t know, if this will work, but the idea was to optimise the homepage and make the SEO plugin “RankMath” that I am using happy and get it to turn green. Pippa suggested to get rid of the carousal at the bottom of the page as sliders or carousals can impact website speed and are not that popular with the visitor.
Instead, she created a grid with products. All the images with links that used to be at the bottom of the page moved to the footer. My social media plugin needed a replacement as it was abandoned by the developer and Pippa created new ones that are also in the footer and on the page.
Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
We went through all pages and optimised and changed them as much as we could. So, you will see that they have a rather different layout.
Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
A bigger font, a new testimonial section and a brand new page.
What’s more – Pippa made the font bigger for all pages – hurrah. My eyesight is getting worse and I found my own website hard to read! Now it’s not just easier for me, but for everyone visiting my website!
We also found a plugin for testimonials – so I transferred my existing testimonials from the customer feedback section to this plugin and customers can now submit their testimonials via this plugin.
I have also added a brand-new page called “My art journey” in which I talk about my art. You can find it here.
I also added another blog post about my alcohol ink experience which you can find here.
We also changed other bits and pieces to increase speed and findability and added the new PayPal buttons via WooCommerce. My website currently offers both: Stripe and PayPal as payment systems.
And that’s pretty much it. I hope you like my new improved website and find it easy to navigate and read. I also hope that this will make a significant difference to my business.
I am certainly happy with the new look and want to thank Pippa for her help. She taught me a lot during the process.
Thank you for reading.
Helen x