Let me review your blog!

Charityshophopping

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Thanks Jon. I have been trying to figure out what is causing the squished posts, and I can't figure it out.

Could I have a few ideas for internal links obvs I need help there.

Who doesn't love a bargain? What you can get, if you look hard enough. Is that better? It sounded good in my head at the time!

Thanks so much for the feedback, it's useful. I'll have to work on it throughout next week xx
 

Jon

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Thanks Jon. I have been trying to figure out what is causing the squished posts, and I can't figure it out.

Could I have a few ideas for internal links obvs I need help there.

Who doesn't love a bargain? What you can get, if you look hard enough. Is that better? It sounded good in my head at the time!

Thanks so much for the feedback, it's useful. I'll have to work on it throughout next week xx

Try changing your theme to a different one and see if the squashyness carries on but either way it needs fixing!

In terms of internal links you just need to add links to other blog posts you’ve written in a natural way so when the google bot hits your site it will bounce from page to page
 

Jon

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I think I am ready for this https://www.theplatinumline.blog
Please be kind

Design

I would make 'the platinum line' into 'The Platinum Line' along with making your contact link on the menu into Contact

You seem to be putting the ENTIRE blog post on the front page instead of just a snippet and then people click through on the title to read the entire post. With all the images it can mean your home page will be quite slow to load on some computers I imagine and also your page views will stay low as everything is getting everything on the front page. Which also means they aren't seeing a lot of your content.

So when they get to your site instead of seeing your latest 10 blog posts they are just seeing the one.

Content

Your content is well written and easy to understand. You make great use of external links so just need to do the same with Internal links now. Your use of photos is also spot on as some of your posts can be quite 'word-heavy' which isn't a bad thing at all, especially when you are breaking it up with images.

Thoughts for the future

I would think about spreading the content out a bit more, it can seem a bit bunched up and shows off all the white space you have to the right hand side. Should just be an easy theme setting to change that.

I would also push your 'subscribe to my email updates' box into widget format on the side.

Some of your formattings also needs looking at. Your contact and 'about' page both seem to push content to the right for some reason so you end up with

nIm1M8N.png
 
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fraserbooks

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Thanks Jon for taking the trouble to write this. I really appreciate it.
 

fraserbooks

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I have managed to work out how to do most of your suggestions but the only way I can find to change the white space on the pages is to change the theme. It only happened when something was updated.
 

Jon

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I have managed to work out how to do most of your suggestions but the only way I can find to change the white space on the pages is to change the theme. It only happened when something was updated.

It's odd that it's created a white space like that? Can you contact the support team behind the theme and see if they can offer any suggestion at all?
 

Pinkii

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Hello!

I just found this thread :) Can you give me your thoughts on my site? The loading speed seems to be really slow, so that's something I need to change, and I'm not too sure about the theme... Anyway, let me know what you think :)

www.abcfamily.co.uk
 

Jon

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Hello!

I just found this thread :) Can you give me your thoughts on my site? The loading speed seems to be really slow, so that's something I need to change, and I'm not too sure about the theme... Anyway, let me know what you think :)

www.abcfamily.co.uk

Hi

I'm afraid I literally can't get your website to load. All I get is a theme based hourglass each time I refresh

I would really suggest you change themes.
b5eRnOC.png
 

Pinkii

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Hi

I'm afraid I literally can't get your website to load. All I get is a theme based hourglass each time I refresh

I would really suggest you change themes.
b5eRnOC.png
My dad had that problem yesterday. Do you think it's a theme problem rather than a hosting problem then?
 

Jon

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My dad had that problem yesterday. Do you think it's a theme problem rather than a hosting problem then?
Yes because the houseglass showing is a theme based one

If you want to prove it go into Wordpress > Appearance and then change the theme to another one

See if it still behaves in the same way
 

Pinkii

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Yes because the houseglass showing is a theme based one

If you want to prove it go into Wordpress > Appearance and then change the theme to another one

See if it still behaves in the same way
I'll do that ☺️ Thank you for the replies, much appreciated.
 
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Jon

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Pinkii

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no worries

you need to do something though as Google will just be destroying your rankings due to the slowness of your site


Running your site through the Google Page Speed tool and you have a score of 8 out of 100!!

BfDDr2I.png
Wow, 8 out of 100 isn't good!!

It took me 2 hours, but I now have a new theme. Fingers crossed it helps ☺️
 

Jon

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Wow, 8 out of 100 isn't good!!

It took me 2 hours, but I now have a new theme. Fingers crossed it helps ☺
Who is your hosting with?

Are you running any kind of plugins?

Your speeds are still awful on your site


The link above will tell you lots of things that need fixing
 

Pinkii

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Who is your hosting with?

Are you running any kind of plugins?

Your speeds are still awful on your site


The link above will tell you lots of things that need fixing
My hosting is with hostgator, but I've been thinking about changing for a while. I'll have a look at the plug ins I've got as well and see if I can do anything there.

Thanks for the link, I'll have a read ☺️
 

Jon

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My hosting is with hostgator, but I've been thinking about changing for a while. I'll have a look at the plug ins I've got as well and see if I can do anything there.

Thanks for the link, I'll have a read ☺
Hostgator seem to be US based

Is there a reason you’re using a company from over there for your blog?
 

Pinkii

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Hostgator seem to be US based

Is there a reason you’re using a company from over there for your blog?
They offered the cheapest hosting at the time and having never set up a website before I didn't think too much about it. That was a mistake lol.
 
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OptimusPrimeval

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This is a really kind offer @Jon thank you.

I and a friend have recently set up a board game reviews blog and although still in its infancy we would really appreciate any feedback.

It's only a freebie hosted on Wordpress at the moment, however as it grows we will look to moving it over to a paid provider (so your 50% deal looks intriguing) to push on.

The link is...

L.D.B.G.Q

Many thanks in advance.

Oh and ignore the amateur videos at the moment, we have only just begun.
 
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Jon

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This is a really kind offer @Jon thank you.

I and a friend have recently set up a board game reviews blog and although still in its infancy we would really appreciate any feedback.

It's only a freebie hosted on Wordpress at the moment, however as it grows we will look to moving it over to a paid provider (so your 50% deal looks intriguing) to push on.

The link is...

L.D.B.G.Q

Many thanks in advance.

Oh and ignore the amateur videos at the moment, we have only just begun.

Design

I found the design and colour scheme to be all over the place. You have a very colourful header image which looks quite low res so the text appears stretched (I would redo it on Canva) and then you don't appear to have a menu. So finding the 'about us' or other blog post categories or how to contact you etc was a bit tricky until I found the very small category multi choice box on the right. You need to make things as useful as intuitive for readers as you can.

Your home page appears to be a sort of Static 'all about this site' page which is fine but I would turn it into a blog post. Condense it into literally one paragraph, select it to 'always be at the top' if that's the information you want to give out and then have your blog posts snippets below it in date order.

Board Games are VERY visual things both in the packaging and in the playing so you want your site to match that as well or else you are not doing justice to your content by making it difficult to find.

Some of your design choices you may be limiting yourself on because you have decided to do things the free way on wordpress. For the sake of £25 and then being able to make everything look the way you want it to and also have a decent domain I would fork out the cash to go self hosted (Which would be a business expense anyway!)

Content

Your reviews of the games are excellent. They tell me everything I could possibly want to know about the game and are littered with high res images from the game (have you got these from elsewhere? Do you have permission to use them?). I would maybe put a bit more effort on your featured image (the top image) on the pages as these are the ones that get pulled through when you promote on social media or elsewhere and some of them again don't do the content justice.

Your YouTube videos do need a fair bit of work. The mic seems to cut out, i'm sure I heard a phone alert go off during one of them, again, everything in your niche is VISUAL so you need to be aiming high with this stuff.

Thoughts for the Future

You are missing a trick with not linking on Amazon to these board games. You tell me all about them and then don't provide me with a link to buy them! The reader at that point would probably be more than willing to click and buy but you are missing that bridge so you want to get all over Amazon Affiliation. ( https://blog.themoneyshed.co.uk/how-to-earn-money-from-your-blog-with-amazon-associates/ )

I would take yourself through our competely FREE Totally Blogging Course as well so you understand how to lead users down a path better and then get them to buy the products you review as I am guessing this is going to be your main source of income from the site!


As ever, you need to internally link a lot more, I barely saw any of that. If you start doing long reviews then I would look at adding Table of Contents to posts and have you section split up using H1 Headers like you can see in long-form content here ( https://blog.themoneyshed.co.uk/how-to-get-money-fast/ ) as Google LOVES Table of Contents on the sort of content you will be writing! Also make use of Scheme Markups ( https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data ) but again I'm not 100% sure you can on the free Wordpress platform you are on but they will let you appear in Google rankings with a 4 out of 5 stars for this product type listing which will really help with your clickthrough
 
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