Site Updates – Arcane Discord

Site Now Music Only

Koda — Wed, 29 May 2019 13:39:12 +0000

We’ve decided to drop the other categories (cars, gaming, and technology) and focus solely on music. This was the aim in the beginning, but it’s taken some time to fully realize that. The other posts have been archived and the search bar is subdivided into music categories. It may take some time to find all of the areas that need changed to reflect the refocusing (e.g. SEO).

Baseline Speed Indices

Koda — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 16:02:53 +0000

This will serve as a starting point to base future optimization.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Pingdom

GTMetrix

SEO Optimization Test

Koda — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 15:54:22 +0000

This theme is a disaster. At least, that’s what I found out when trying to optimize the site’s search engine performance. The site does not rate highly even when the exact name is typed out. I am theorizing that it’s because the site title is “Arcane[DISCORD],” the stylized version of the name. I’ve changed it to “Arcane Discord” to see if that helps raise its page score.

The reason that the theme is a disaster in this regard is that it creates URLs that Google is trying to index but cannot load them. I don’t know how or why it’s doing this, but it raises a lot of red flags in Google Search Console.

Removed Load Blocking Elements

Koda — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 20:30:03 +0000

By removing the 6 lines of code that connected to nothing (courtesy of the theme provider) we’ve been able to speed up page loading significantly. Initial paint is not faster, but the final elements of the page will now complete much quicker. These include the floating header, share icons, and floating sidebar. You’ll now see that your browser doesn’t continue to load while you’re already starting the articles. This bugged the hell out of me, but you may or may not have noticed. Either way, it’s fixed now. That being said, the speed score still leaves much to be desired–will keep working on that.

Fixed Browser SSL Certificate Authorization

Koda — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 20:21:05 +0000

See the little lock next to the domain name in your browser bar up there? That used to be an “i.” What the “i” indicated was that your browser didn’t consider the site completely secure. The reason for that is it identified some elements loading in through http. Rest assured, it was secure the whole time.

It was a shitload of shit trying to identify the shit that was causing this shit cuz it’s all shit. But essentially the WordPress theme that we use had some legacy elements incorporated into its mobile version. This mobile version had sample images that it was using as backgrounds for menus or lightboxes and the addresses of the sample images were the old transfer protocol (http). Once that was identified by sifting through the website’s source code the offending elements were deleted and now the site loads through https. Lock icon achieved, +50 Gamerscore.