As always, I’m starting this blogging year on a positive note. But for many reasons, 2024 was a tough one. So what happened?
Well, first of all, this happened:
Google’s March Update
Blog traffic took a nosedive, and I documented my woes along the way…
JetPack ruins WordPress
Then to add insult to injury JetPack, WordPress’s most ubiquitous plugin got greedy and started charging for things, like site stats.
But this forced me into a well-needed and long-awaited rethink about how I do things regarding optimisation, so I went back to school and for the first time integrated a CDN and chopped down my plugins list to the bare bones.
The Turnaround
And then, as if by happy accident or hard work, in August 2024 I managed to turn things around…
But I didn’t stop there. Re-motivated, I looked at the situation as a second chance at Blogging. How could I capitalise on my experience moving forward? Well, since day one I’d kept to the mantra of ‘make, not spend money’, but now I needed an edge, and to do that I needed to ‘speculate to accumulate‘, so I purchased WP-Rocket as my all-in-one caching/site optimisation plugin. (20% off with this link too)
Back in the Game
Now I’d returned to page-one Google rankings, it was time to re-invigorate my YouTube Channel too, and for that Guitar Geordie was born to provide the channel with more focus and clarity.
… And into 2025
2024 was a rollercoaster. An absolute nightmare of having my blogging dreams almost shattered and feeling helpless to do anything about it. In many ways, it felt like starting over and exploring everything I’d learned again from the ground up.
On the positive side, I learned not to be complacent and not to forget about the mechanics of making my site as good as it can be, both performance and content-wise. Moving into 2025 I’m approaching the two major milestones of a million blog views and 1000 YouTube subscribers with my ultimate aim of having each one feeding the other, as it were. 2025 could well be the year I achieve that.
You can subscribe to Guitar Geordie here and receive blog updates by email via my Newsletter (check out the footer of the page).
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for reading and following my blog, some of you from my first ever post Goa : A Lesson in Life. Chapter 1 : Mumbai, way back in May 19th 2016, almost 9 years ago! I truly never thought I’d get this far.
I hope you all have a fantastic 2025.
Love
Adam