Site Revamp. It’s SO Speeeeedy, now!

A while back I mentioned that I was having site issues, and had to shift all the Stories Rule Press authors’ sites over to a new host.

The new host (Hostinger) has provided resources that make all the sites a lot faster, just by migrating over. But one of the issues I was having was that the expensive theme I had been using for nearly ten years — Avada — which was a delight when I first bought it — was slowing down the sites.

This gets a bit technical, if you’ve never run a WordPress site before. I’ll try to explain this simply. Avada has a built in page builder, that makes building fancy-dancy pages easy. You just have to drag and drop, and click off the options you want. It’s fantastic at building some amazing pages.

Only, every time you use the page builder, or any of the options that Avada offers, a humungous batch of ugly code is added to the page. Avada hides that code, so you just see the beautiful page. But if the Avada theme isn’t active, then all that ugly coding is visible to anyone who visits the page.

Plus, the more pages you have with this invisible glop of coding, the slower the site runs in general.

My old host service simply couldn’t cope with the code-heavy author sites. They weren’t a WordPress specialist.

Hostinger IS a WordPress specialist, but still, the sites were visibly slow to load, which isn’t good.

The only problem is: As soon as I use any theme other than Avada, I am forced to go through every single page and post on the site, and manually hunt down and delete all the gloppy coding that Avada left behind.

But…I had no choice. Sooner or later, I would have to do this. I did not want to be stuck with Avada forever.

And that is what I have been doing for the last few weeks, in my infinite spare time. I have been going through all the sites, swapping out the Avada theme for a very lightweight but powerful new theme (Astra). Then going through every page and post and deleting the ugly code that was now visible.

The site I dreaded doing the most was mine. This one. (If you’re reading this in an email, you can click on the subject line at the top, and read the post on the site, then explore a bit.

But I have finally finished it, and the site is so much faster than it used to be!

If you’ve never visited my site before, head over and check it out here. There are a lot of features there, including the Freebie page, which is the most popular page on the site.

Scandalous Scions Box Four out soon!