Site Update – Major progress made

Ahoy mateys!  Over the past few weeks I have been making a bunch of changes to the site, posting new content, and republishing some old content from Miniature Trading.

However, the biggest news is that I finally got the site speed mostly optimized.  Very recently the GTMetrix analysis of my homepage returned dismal results – ratings of D for the page speed.  Through a bunch of technical changes and searching for tutorials, I have now optimized it to a rating of A!  (consistently ranking at 92% or higher!)  This is fantastic, but sometimes loading various pages on the site is still too slow.   I plan to re-analyze the page speed almost every day, and I also plan to go through all of the main menu pages to see if they need further optimization.  I just retested the homepage in Google PageSpeed Insights and it got a score of 99 for desktop and 95 for mobile.  I may still also play around with the mobile settings to change how it looks, but that can’t be a priority quite yet given the potential imminent closure of Miniature Trading.

The Forum is up and running, and growing by the day.  I just added a bunch of essential topics found at Miniature Trading, and will continue to add more as time allows.

Monetization

I will continue to add affiliate links when relevant on various pages, and I may even get an “eBay portal” type thing up sometime soon. (though I don’t want to go too crazy and negatively impact search result rankings)  Especially as the site grows in size, user base, and popularity (rankings and page visits/etc), this should help sustain the site for many years to come (and of course I will simply pay out of pocket if it doesn’t become profitable, which I’m working on now).

If you would like to support my efforts directly, my Paypal email is a7xfanben@gmail.com and I now have a Patreon page.

Below you can see the PageSpeed results from November 11th.  As said before, I plan to continuously work on improving page speeds over time, but at least now it should be acceptable. (but again, not necessarily for all pages as some have lots of pictures or potential undiscovered issues)

GTMetrix scores for the homepage as of 11/11/2018