The year started with a necessary MySQL and PHP update. Because at the end of last year, I had already detected that the blog was slow and when I entered to see published articles, a strange error appeared.
If there is only one thing I hate about having a blog, it is this part of updating, handling terms and technologies that I do not know. There have been a couple of times that I move him to something that he did not have to touch and I break down the whole blog, and the problem lasts for at least a couple of weeks.
That is why right now I have contacted the technical part of my hosting (which I also hate, because they ask me questions about subjects that I do not know, but they think I should master), so that they do all the updating work.
In total, the technical hosting team took about 25 minutes to make these much-needed updates.
The result was slow and painful but very good, immediately the loading speed of the blog was improved.
Summary of everything that happened during the year on the blog
By March 11 I began to see a very rare error on the blog, a code appeared at the top of the page. But it was so strange that I only found a couple of articles on the internet, where they made mention of possible causes and their respective solutions.
Turns out that error was because there are a lot of redirects on the blog (I talked about that in last year’s roundup). The solution is to eliminate them, it sounds easy but it is not. I have to remove each of them by hand, in total they are just over 300 items.
I estimate that it will take me at least four months to do so. The good thing is that the error disappeared instantly after removing the first redirects.
At the end of March and beginning of April, something happened that will be very difficult for the whole world to forget: the Coronavirus appeared. In those days something happened that had not happened in the history of the blog; I ran out of topics to post on the blog.
There was a time when design-related information came to a halt. Therefore, I had no material to share on the blog. I thought for a moment about shutting down the blog for a couple of weeks and enjoying the quarantine. To return with fresh content, but instead of closing the business, I decided to share YouTube channels that I have followed for many years.
Something surprising happened and that content was very well received, in fact those days -almost months-, the number of daily visits increased to double than normal.
In the middle of May, a publication caused visits to skyrocket by 500%. It was thanks to the fact that a video on Facebook went viral, more than three million people saw it! I was surprised that the server where the blog is hosted, hold like the greats.
At the beginning of March I began to notice that the blog pages were disappearing from the results in Google. I immediately started looking for the cause of the problem and discovered that it was the plugin’s fault: Speed Booster Pack. It got a big update and it caused a conflict with another plugin that was running at the same time on the blog.
Deactivate the Speed Booster Pack plugin and Google started sending visits to the blog, as it did at the beginning of the year. In fact I think that the visits increased more than at the beginning of the problem with the pluging.
Besides deactivating that plugin, I deactivated and uninstalled 5 more, that made the blog will work better. Another thing I did was install a plugin that minify css, js and html. Which means that Google loves me a little more, because the blog loads faster, or at least that’s what should happen.
The last month of 2020, I decided to do something that I had already seen recommended in many of the blogs that I follow, it is: quality instead of quantity.
That means that instead of publishing a new blog post every day, I will be publishing two or maximum three articles per week. That will allow me to focus on publishing longer, more thoughtful articles.
It is a change that will be for the good of the blog, the quality of the content will increase. I also plan to do other things for 2021, such as inviting writers / designers and creatives to publish content on the blog.
And to finish the year, I published the 2021 calendar that I designed with royalty-free illustrations. I thought that only a couple of people would download it, maximum 20. But the big surprise is that the post was positioned very well in search engines, Instagram and even on Linkedin. Until today, the calendar downloaded over 1,500 times.
2021 can be seen to be fine, at least it will be a better year than 2020, of that I’m sure