Hello, hello! If you’ve been on What The Fab lately, you may have noticed some changes to the website!
Welcome to the brand new site design. I’m absolutely obsessed with how it turned out.
We did a soft launch of the new site a few weeks ago and continued to work through a few bugs, and now it’s at a point that I’m super happy with.
And also, I’m poppin’ the champagne, because last month my blog hit a huge milestone—200,000 pageviews. WHAT.
Most of my traffic comes from Google and my targeted SEO strategies that I implement in my blog posts. I teach these strategies and how you can use SEO to have a high-traffic website that generates recurring revenue for you in my free webinar, which you can register for here!
I remember a few years ago when my blog was getting 15k monthly pageviews, and 100k felt impossible. So to hit 200k and imagine hundreds of thousands of people reading my posts in a month feels pretty wild.
And it’s also a reminder to myself to set big goals, because if I thought 100k was impossible but I’ve blown by that, I can make 500k or a million happen (even if that sounds “impossible” to me right now).
To celebrate this milestone, I did a fun 200k photoshoot, complete with balloons, cupcakes, champagne, and a hot pink sequin jumpsuit. Because, why not?
I think as bloggers and business owners, it’s far too easy to hit a goal, celebrate for a minute, and then get back to work on the next goal. But we need to take time to celebrate our wins, big and small!
The other thing that hitting 200k made me realize, is that my site was in need of an upgrade.
I had been on a Pipdig theme for years, which is a pretty popular option for fashion and lifestyle bloggers. It worked fine for a while but at this point, I had long outgrown it.
Personally, in hindsight I think once you get past around 50k monthly pageviews, Pipdig is just too slow and can’t handle higher traffic. And my site had always had a low pagespeed and failed on Google’s Core Web Vitals.
Plus, things with my business are so different than they were five years ago. Back then, my site was only my blog, and my blog post articles were my only offering, so a homepage where you scroll and see excerpts of the most recent posts made sense.
Now, in addition to my blog, I’ve launched a podcast and two products—What The Fab Presets and my SEO Course, Six-Figure SEO.
On the old site, it just felt like there was a lot to look at and readers had click anxiety—they didn’t know where to navigate to or what to click next. I hadn’t even added my course to the homepage of my old site because I frankly didn’t know where to put it, lol.
When designing this new site, my intention was to make it really clear what offerings I have, with new posts front and center on the homepage (but in a more collapsed format), and sections as you scroll for my different media and products.
The other major change I made was moving my site over to a framework called Trellis. If you’re part of Mediavine, you’re familiar with Trellis.
Trellis is the framework that Mediavine has built specifically for bloggers with ads on their site. The framework is designed to be super lightweight and speedy, all in an effort to increase your pagespeed, help your site pass Google’s Core Web Vitals, and get your ads to load faster, so you make more money from them.
Because ads revenue from Mediavine has become one of my main revenue streams (I’m expecting to bring in ~$55k this year just from ads on my site—if you’re interested in learning more be sure to check out the income report episodes on my podcast), I decided it was time to make the investment into a new website, and I’m hopeful that the new, speedy design will help increase my RPMs and earn me even more ads revenue (at this point, it’s too early to tell, but my blog post layout is passing Core Web Vitals already, so that’s exciting!).
I hope you love the new design and I can’t wait to hear your thoughts! If you have questions or are looking for a developer who can build a custom child theme for Trellis, feel free to hit me up and I can share my guy with you.
Thank you for reading this post, for being here, and for celebrating with me on this milestone. It means so much!
Elise Armitage is an entrepreneur and founder of What The Fab, a travel + lifestyle blog based in California. At the beginning of 2019, Elise left her corporate job at Google to chase her dreams: being an entrepreneur and helping women find fabulous in the everyday. Since then, she’s launched her SEO course Six-Figure SEO, where she teaches bloggers how to create a passive revenue stream from their website using SEO. Featured in publications like Forbes, Elle, HerMoney, and Real Simple, Elise is a firm believer that you can be of both substance and style.
