Hello Reader,
Over a decade ago, I designed my website on SmugMug. Back then, SmugMug was one of the best CMS options for photographers. CMS is an abbreviation for Content Management System. It helps users to change, create and manage content on a website. The big plus is that you don't have to code, which makes creating a website much faster and less error-prone. The negative aspect is that you're in the clutch of the hosting service. Whenever they change anything on the interface, you have to accept it. And you don't have control over the code of the website. If the core of the code is slow, with lots of CSS, JavaScript and fonts, you can do nothing about it. Nowadays, speed is everything. Search engines will punish slow websites.
I was able to speed up my SmugMug site. Instead of using their blocks, I coded the homepage myself. It made the starting page faster.
The problem is that the largest contentful paint is still slow. The largest contentful paint marks the point when the page's main content has loaded. There is nothing I can do about that.
Furthermore, SEO is bad on SmugMug. You can create meta descriptions, fill in keywords, and so on. But most of your pages won't get indexed by search engines. That is right! About 70% of your pages are invisible for whatever reason. People won't find your website because it is not indexed. So what is the point of having images on such a service? If people know your website, that is less of a problem. But if you rely on getting found, you're doomed. Worse still, you can't run an SEO audit. Whenever I did that, I got an error. An SEO audit gives you deep insight into your website. It evaluates your search engine abilities, checks every page on SEO and gives you results. And that is not possible on a SmugMug site.
Many complain about SmugMug SEO, but SmugMug does nothing about it. Jim Hughes wrote a lot of blogs about SmugMugs SEO. Type his name in a search engine along with SmugMug and read them. He gave me a well-deserved hit on my head. I had to act! That can't go on forever!
I started looking for other CMS. The problem was they weren't better than SmugMug. I tried a lot of them. Luckily, these days you have a wide choice of CMS. There are so many to choose from. The bigger ones are SquareSpace and Wix. And many smaller ones also want a piece of the pie. I also read many reviews, but none of those CMS convinced me. They are either slow or have terrible SEO. And I would be dependent on the new service again. I didn't want that! So what are my options?
After reading, testing and thinking a lot, I jumped on WordPress. WordPress is also a kind of CMS, but much more open. You have access to the code and can design your website any way you want.
To run WordPress, you need a host, a fast one. LiteSpeed servers are great. RAM, CPU cores, storage, and bandwidth are relevant too. I'm on a shared server, which isn't the best solution. A virtual private server, also known as a cloud, would be way faster but more expensive. Maybe in the future, I will switch to a cloud server.
Also important is to pick a fast and lightweight theme. A theme is the backbone of your WordPress website. Tom Dupuis from Online Media Masters has a website dedicated to speeding up WordPress. Reading his blogs helped me a lot. He knows what he is writing.
I still have a lot to do for my WordPress site. Such as writing texts, uploading photos, and tweaking my website to get faster.
Unfortunately, the domain name of my website has been offline for one week. And it still is. Sorry to everyone who tried to visit my site. Somehow, connecting my domain name to my host didn't work. I still have to figure out what the problem is. And I hope to resolve it next week.
Stay creative,
Ars