OK, now that we have the tongfamily.com site running at about three seconds, this is three times as fast as before (9 seconds), we are getting an 84/100 from Pagespeed and the built-in Boost is showing us at 92/100 for Desktop and 55/100 for Mobile (with JetPack Boost CSS and Javascript plus Image CDN raising it from 84 and 44 respectively), this is really not that bad for a tiny WordPress site.
Adding some things back in like ActivityPub
I turned off all the activity pub features that make the site visible as a Mastodon site, so you can follow @blog@tongfamily.com or @rich@tongfamily.com which are for all posts or just my posts respectively, and point to the main website and my author page. I also have an automatic posting of the site to @richtong@mastodon.social which is https://mastodon.social/@richtong in traditional URL syntax.
The main bug is that at least on Mastonaut and Whalebird, I can see my author pages but not the @blog entries, I can follow but nothing comes up. Pretty cool though. As an aside Whalebird is nice because the search is right there. The layout of Mastonaut is better, but it is hard to find search in Mastonaut, so it’s great for reading but amazingly hard to search
Analytics and SEO at least installed
I deleted my Monster Insights a while ago, but might as well complete the remake, might as well add analytics back in. I’ve not been focused at all on SEO, but might as well learn what people are talking about. Hubspot, and WP Mania, but here are some free ones:
- MonsterInsights. This is the most popular one and it puts Google Analytics trackers on your site. And it is free.
- Google Analytics Dashboard. This is a simpler thing than MonsterInsights
- Analytify. They are like Monster with tracking codes and a small limited version
- GA Google Analytics. Its a single feature thingy which is to add the trackers, but you have you don’t get the dashboard in WordPress.
Given all this, I just reinstalled Monster Analytics and it requires you to plug into their site and then takes you to Google I have a throw-away account on Google that I use for this. This pulled in this email campaign thing and reminded me I should start a Substack soon and use the blog post to populate it.
The main horrible thing though is that when you download MonsterInsights, it pushes WP Forms, User Feedback, and OptinMonster as well, so make sure to get rid of those
I also have All in One SEO which I never use, so need to figure that out too, but in summary, I have all the basics, and now I need to learn how to use it. Interestingly, without any work, I get an 89/100 for SEO!
