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Thank you for checking out the highlight of day 32 of my £1 a day challenge. On this day I looked into improving my website performance. I found some info online stating, if a website takes longer than 3 seconds to upload, 50% of traffic will leave before even looking at your site. This seems like an important issue, so I went about finding ways to improve the load up speed of the Money Your Concern website…

Day 32: Morning

Today, I logged on early to get on with improving my Money Your concern website. There’s so much more to it than I initially thought. I did a bit of research looking for some extra tips for improving a new website. Here’s the list of new tasks I’ve found…

1. Set up google analytics- to track the views that come in on my site.
2. Upload a security plug-in for an extra barrier against hackers.
3. I need to check out the performance and upload speed of my site.
4. Then go about what I need to do to speed up my site.

Firstly though today, I focused on completing my £1 challenge. Thankfully, I still have some double point surveys left over from my level-up. This helped greatly in gaining me enough Swagbucks after one 30 minute survey. 

Along with a couple of search rewards, today I earned 192 SB’s (£1.50) for around 45 minutes time spent on Swagbucks. 

Afternoon: Improving my website performance

Progressing on to my website tasks, some aspects were easier than others…

1. Google analytics was fairly easy to set up. There are plenty of Youtube videos detailing what to do. I followed one of these using the Monsterinsights plug-in and this was all set up within 5 minutes.
2. Again, the process of adding security was as simple as following another Youtube video. I uploaded the iThemes security plug-in, which was easy to use and fast to set up.

The next job was a little more tricky…

3. The site recommended for a performance check up was GTmetrics.com. Here you type in your website name and it gives a free scan of your site for flaws in its upload performance. Unsurprisingly, many flaws were found with my site.
4. The good thing about GTmetrix is that it will list off all of the things you need to improve. Firstly, some of my image sizes were too large for the actual size on the website. It took me a while but in the end I managed to work out how to change the sizing and replace the images. Unfortunately the other issues involved coding. I’m not confident in this area and therefore took the decision to leave this for now. After rechecking the performance, the website speed had improved somewhat.

However, I did find out there’s a plug-in called WP Rocket. This does all of the coding work for you. Unfortunately, you need to pay for this service, so I decided to leave this until I get more visitors to the site and more performance optimisation is required.

Thanks for checking out day 32 of my £1 a day challenge…

If you are keen to learn to make some extra money online and want to follow my complete journey, you can follow my £1 a day challenge here!!

If you found this post useful or if you have any questions, feel free to post them below in the comments sectoin.

Thanks, talk soon.

Harry