* Installed Google Analytics along with registering a Google Search Console account for imusicacademy.com This will become more useful later – seeing what page visitors first land on, dropoff points, hints for what kind of content would be good to add etc. I’ll txt the gmail/pass associated with these.
* Fixed – “Bob Tylor” typo on stagingsite/pianoteacher – biography text needed to replace pigLatin. The text should include something about your approach/philosophy/ topics / skills you teach, and your emphasis (e.g. jazz)
* On the piano lessons page, there should be a great photo of you at the piano – maybe with a student(?)
* On the trumpet lessons page there should be a great photo of you with a trumpet
* Given your photo with the instrument, perhaps we should add ukulele lessons to the site’s offerrings at some point.
* CSS3 Rotating Words plugin disabled – trying to minimize the number of plugins at this stage (for site speed and simplicity). They can always be re-activated later or deleted if determined they aren’t needed. I realize I’ve been adding plugins too and they are candidates for the chopping block too. In the meantime I’m researching sitespeed changes when toggling plugins off and on (using the staging server)
a) Removed shortcode from “piano-teacher” page and other pages that use this. Replaced with static text such as “LIVE PERSONALIZED PIANO LESSONS ONLINE”. Let me know if you want the text changed.
b) Reduced 3 H1 tags to one – (good SEO practice) – it’s ok to use other h tags multiple times (h2, h3 etc)
* Made the wp-load file writeable. This seems to have sped up the initial server response time by at least 10 seconds(!) The site is still too slow, so we need to do more as far as site-speed goes.
* Updated live site theme and plugins – WPBakery Page Builder is not yet updated. I forget why, but there was something that made me reluctant to update and/or disable this until I’m more familiar with this theme and how the site works.
* Added an anti-spam plugin to live site – Antispam Bee. Akismet is only free for non-business sites. Hopefully this helps cut down on any form spam received.
* Added a backup plugin to live site – Updraft. We can delete this later if there is already another option. This is just what I’m used to.
* Added a seo campaign for imusicacademy.com in my MozPro account. This may provide some helpful info outside of GA and GSC.
* Added shortpixel image optimizer plugin – disabled Smush. I did that since I have a shareable license for shortpixel. I bought a license allowing 10,000 images to be optimized. As of writing this, there are over 8,000 left.
* The bluehost plugin is installed. The reason for keeping it is the “Staging” feature. The staging site is at https://imusicacademy.com/staging/3967 You can deploy to the live site and toggle between the two within the plugin. The plugin seems buggy when toggling between staging and production (404 page, making it necessary to edit the url in the browser). It doesn’t seem to do any harm to the live site though, so I’ll keep it for now. I have another staging site as well like Jon does. I’ll choose between the two at some point.