Motivation gets you started. Habits keep you going.

Do you ever feel like you just want to quit? That was me this month. Call it an endless to-do list, feeling like I am falling short, and spending way too much time “troubleshooting”…  then add a new baby and a toddler to the mix. Family always comes first, and blogging can sometimes feel like such a distraction.

If I didn’t love it and get so much enjoyment out of connecting with you guys then it would be really easy to throw in the towel. But last September I told myself I would be “all in” until December 2018.  If I wasn’t creating something engaging and helpful, then I would sign off.

But in the last few months, I feel like I have learned so much and came so far with blogging.

Despite so many issues with my site being down, and feeling “blah” about it this month, it just comes down to keeping the momentum going.

March has been my best month for traffic, email growth and revenue. I truly believe the harder I work, the luckier I get. I think that would be my tagline if I ever became a Real Housewife.

None the less, I heard a great quote that really sums up blogging.

Motivation gets you started. Habits keep you going.

Despite my motivation really lacking this month, I am persevering out of habit. I didn’t learn real perseverance until I had my first daughter. But just like riding a bike, it doesn’t go away. That’s why as mommy bloggers, we gotta keep keepin’ on. 🙂

Here are my key takeaways for my March Blogging Report

5 Things that make your site Crash

Mo Plugins’ Mo’ Problems?

Plugins are awesome, they can really supercharge a theme, but they can also make a mess of a theme. I learned this first hand as my website went down multiple times over the past week.  

Apparently this is a huge problem, but I have never heard anyone mention it. I had to go to the black market of the interweb. Not really, but seriously, I had no idea that certain plugins could take your whole site down.

The remedy is deactivating all of your plugins and activating them one by one until you troubleshoot the “problem.” Fun, right?

SSL and CDN

SSl that thing that puts the little “S” in your https://, and CDN, which I still don’t know what it is, together, can make your site crash. I have also experienced this at least four times. How the CDN keeps getting enabled, I have know idea. Has anyone else had on going issues with this? I keep having to reach out to my service provider to “fix” this.

Installing a new layout with plugins from an old layout

Remember, Mo’ Plugins Mo’ Problems? Well, installing my new theme (DIVI, yay!) was causing me to go offline because of my old layout’s required plugins. Activating new themes can cause your site to go down if you have old plugins.

And can we please talk about how WordPress has not yet made it so we can create a new theme and get it perfect, then launch it? All the changes are basically done in real time, as you have traffic. UGH. We still have a long way to go in blogging 🙂 Come on WordPress! Let’s come up with a solution for this!

Large images

Recently, I started switching my images over to a .PNG.  Turns out these can take up a ton of space on your website. This can cause your website to run at super slow speeds. It’s best if you are creating your own pins in Adobe to go to File >>Save to Web >> JPEG ..

I noticed Canava saves images as a .PNG. I am not sure if they do an image smushing, as I know TONS of bloggers save these to their blogs. But with Adobe, it made a big difference. UGH, sometimes Trial and Error learning can be sooo overrated.

Want to check your site speed? Bluehost pointed me here when “troubleshooting.” It gives you a report card on your sites speed. https://gtmetrix.com

MySQL Repair and Optimize Tables in phpMyAdmin

I had no idea what this was, but to help my “slow” running site, I had to repair and optimize tables in phpMyAdmin. Basically, I just followed this step by step tutorial here. Apparently this is supposed to be done every so often?

https://my.bluehost.com/hosting/help/496

Investments & Upgrades

Tasty Pins 

I purchased the plugin Tasty Pins. It gives an additional box when you upload an image exclusively for Pinterest.  Mainly, it appears that what is good for a Pinterest ranking(hashtags) is not good for Google ranking. For the low price, low price of 29.00 a year, you can easily separate the two. (P.S. No, I am not an affiliate)

You can do this manually with an html code, but I am all about keeping it simple. I haven’t had it long enough to see if it’s effective. I will follow up with you guys in a month or two to see if my Google traffic increases.

A new Theme

This is my third theme. Hopefully it’s a winner. It’s Divi by Elegant themes. I finally settled on this theme because of how you can customize in away you cannot any other layout(that I have come across). It has a visual editor that makes it super simple. There are tons of options, so it will probably be a little while before my final layout is ready. Until then I am just going to use the clean and simple layout that you see now.

All right, That’s all for now folks.