Authors, How's Your Website Performing?

Fellow authors, how is your website's performance? Mine is great! Here's a free website grader, coincidentally called Website Grader.

I was a bit trepidacious plugging my website address in (I don't need any more bad news), but guess what?

  

 

The site has a lot more categories, but I'm not going to paste them here, because, well, I'm great! I aced all of them, even the ones I don't claim to understand. Website Grader checks both mobile performance and desktop.

I suppose the reason this means so much to me is that I worked really hard on improving my site. Yes, it's Blogger's free hosting, which I turned into a website with just a few easy deletions, then I just needed to attach my domain to it. I shouldn't say "just" because the instructions were completely unclear and required a lot of second guessing. 

Eventually, I figured out how to add SEO to my site and a few other tricks, like alt-text and custom permalinks. I managed to embed my newsletter signup form and my contact form (and my novel's Spotify playlist) with only a couple of false starts. I finally gave up on being able to place certain elements, such as book reviews so they'd align correctly (Blogger's big deficiency), so I created separate blocks with Canva for each reviewed book, with snippets of text reviews and links to the books themselves inside them, then loaded them onto my site. (I hate being told I can't do something.)

I hated the default white background, so I created an "image" in Canva that was just black, surrounded by a grey outline and used that as my background image. I finally figured out how to transfer to a different page without scrolling all the way back up to the top header and choosing from there. It's not perfect (at all); it's just a vertical page list at the bottom of each page with links, but that's all Blogger would allow me to do.

Because Blogger doesn't have any bells and whistles, such as floating graphics or pop-ups, my site loads fast. Blogger has never refused to let me add as many images as I wanted due to "overloading". I recently made my news section less generic by adding images to each post, which makes the page pop.

It's true that my site is quite basic, but it has everything I need and want.

Finally, something that feels like an accomplishment!