The past month I have found out that there is a steep learning curve that comes along with running a blog, and few times make it more evident than when things just won’t work the way you want them to. I have had some late nights over the last 30 days, to the point I’m pretty sure my husband questions if he is in fact married, I have hit roadblocks that at times seemed insurmountable, and I have stressed out over things that really weren’t that hard to fix.
I can’t tell you what exact problems you will run into while designing your blog, but I can guarantee you will run into a few. I would love to share how I approached my own issues in order to successfully overcome each and every one. So that when unthinkable happens to you, you are ready to scale that seemingly impossible wall!
The steps to take to solve ANY blogging problem.
1) Take a deep breath, it will be okay! Look at this as a learning opportunity.
2) Identify the root of the problem to the best of your ability. For example, when I couldn’t access my site through wordpress.com I deduced that there was an issue with Jetpack because I knew it was the “link” between my self-hosted site and wordpress.com
3) Open up Google Search and type in the issue you are having. Use rich keyword descriptors and keep it specific . For example instead of typing in “My webpage won’t work”, type in “changed theme and now recent post feed isn’t showing”
4) Read anything and everything you can find relevant on Google. Don’t discount forums because there is often problem-solving gold to be found in the replies.
5) If your initial search did not yield what you are looking for, try similar phrases that mean the same thing and perhaps reduce your specificity. For example if my initial search was ” SIFE theme not displaying header image properly” I could try “header image not showing on my website”
6) Ask for help on Facebook blogger communities, chances are someone has dealt with the same problem before. The only reason I put this secondary to Google is that posts on pages are often moderated, meaning it may take a bit to get a reply.
7) Contact the support team if the problem is associated with a plug in, a theme, or your web host to see if they have any advice.
8) If it’s late let it be for the night and try again tomorrow, fresh eyes and a fresh mind may make it easier to find a solution or you may get exactly the reply you need from your facebook post. If the glitch or issue is associated with a new unessential plug-in consider deactivating it til you can find a solution, if it has to do with a theme consider reverting back to your old one temporarily, and if the problem is really bad and impacts the functionality of your webpage decide if making the call to turn on your “coming soon” default page may be appropriate.
You should be able to troubleshoot pretty much any problem on your own, but if you ever get into a situation where you can’t fix it and it’s a biggie reaching out to a web designer may help, but it will cost you! In case you have run into any of the problems I’ve personally experienced, I’ve included the solutions I’ve found and information I’ve gathered.
Help! I changed my theme and now I’m having issues!
I can’t access my self-hosted site through wordpress.com.
Google says my account can’t be verified and I tried everything!
My featured images are cropped and unreadable.
Facebook keeps deleting my links!
My Pinterest monthly viewers are different on my profile and my analytics.
Help! I changed my theme and now I’m having issues!
In the short month I’ve had my blog I have gone through no less than 4 themes. The first was what I thought I wanted until I actually started blogging and then realized it didn’t allow me to have the usability I wanted. I changed again only to decide it wasn’t the look I wanted. So, after finally finding a free theme I liked and matched “my style,” I installed it, changed my cover photo, and thought that would be that. But it can never be that easy…
It looked fine on both my computer and my phone, but as soon as I logged onto it on my husband’s phone glitches galore occurred. My logo would flicker, the black screen of death appeared, buttons appeared on some pages and not others, it just would not work right. Of course all I could think about was if others visited my page and had this experience they would “nope” right outta there.
After checking settings, googling, and losing some hair, I came across a suggestion meant for another theme to switch themes and then switch back. It worked! I have no clue why but as soon as I reinstalled the theme everything functioned perfectly.
I can’t access my self-hosted site through wordpress.com.
This was one of my most frustrating issues, and I didn’t realize it was happening until I participated on a ” First Friday” thread on WP Reader and I couldn’t get my WordPress follow button to work. I couldn’t find a solution on Google, it just kept telling me to have Jetpack installed (which it was). It was then I noticed on my WordPress.com dashboard it showed that my site couldn’t be accessed with a lovely little red exclamation point.
Obviously there was an issue occurring in the link between my site and WordPress.com, which meant Jetpack wasn’t functioning optimally. So I deactivated and reactivated my Jetpack plug in and all of the sudden it worked and the little red exclamation point disappeared. Unfortunately, I also lost my previous three weeks of Jetpack stats in the process so if you notice this issue fix it before you have much to lose!
Google says my account can’t be verified and I tried everything!
After finally deciding to take SEO and analytics a bit more seriously, I realized I needed a Google account. Google provides some of the best analytics around and a link to their search console is needed to properly run several SEO plug-in’s.
So I created my account, entered my site information, and uploaded my meta tag ( since I already had experience with meta tags due to Pinterest verification), in return I got a lovely notification saying the site could not be verified. Google then recommended I verify through my web host, this also failed. Then it recommended I utilize a TXT upload to verify, still didn’t work. I googled how to upload a HTML file onto my site, tried that, still didn’t work.
At this point I was frustrated. All Google FAQS had to say was to contact your web host if you are having trouble, and that changes could possibly take 48 hours to register. I contacted my web host and the customer service rep said it showed up on their end so she didn’t understand the problem ( after 20 minutes of wait and chat). I googled to find out if anyone had success with it being verified automatically if it didn’t take immediately and couldn’t find any such assurance.
So I did the one thing which really does not come naturally to me and waited. The next day no change, the day after verified finally appeared! So if you are having issues verifying your site through google here is the answer I could not find: give it time, and chances are good that it will be verified over the next two days.
My featured images are cropped and unreadable.
Every time I changed my theme my previously very attractive featured photos decided to look completely indecipherable. There are a couple of options for dealing with this. One is to edit the functions.php file and use a child’s theme to maintain the changes while allowing your theme to still be updated. Personally, I am not that comfortable messing around with codes and child’s themes so I bypassed the option altogether.
The second option is to install a plug-in like simple image sizes which will allow you to adjust the featured image size without messing around with your coding directly. If you really have a lot of time invested in your featured images or have a lot of posts this is probably the most pain-free way to go about this.
The third option is to manually resize and recreate all featured images to display ideally within your theme’s parameters. I really liked the layout of my theme and didn’t want to potentially disrupt it by changing my featured image sizes, so this is the option I went with. It took some time but I only had about 20 posts and associated thumbnails so it wasn’t a terribly tedious job.
Facebook keeps deleting my links!
If you are trying to expand your blog’s reach (like I have been), chances are good that you are in one or more blogging support groups on facebook. Everything goes swimmingly at first and then all of the sudden the link you know you just added disappears. Thinking maybe it was user error you try again, only for it once again to disappear into the void.
It’s not you or your groups admin (even though I may have asked to be sure), my understanding is that facebook has pretty much flagged you and put you in “link posting jail.” You may be asking WHY ? They think you are spamming their site and they don’t appreciate it. Look at it from their standpoint, someone is going around posting the same or similar links as comments in response to multiple posts. Sure it is allowed by the admins on your page, but the current Facebook algorithm doesn’t factor that in.
To the algorithm it looks like you could be putting your cat fur mittens Etsy shop link on every post you can find, randomly inserting it on popular posts like news stories or recipe videos. As a user you don’t want that to happen and if you run a facebook page for your blog you can probably agree it would be REALLY annoying if some Joe Schmoe decided to post the same link to his unrelated taxidermied possums on every single one of your 50 posts. This is what Facebook is trying to prevent.
My guess is at some point Facebook will give page admins the option to opt out of spam protection, which will solve these problems in closed facebook groups. Until then the only things I’ve found help are spreading out when you drop your links (instead of doing it all at once), not posting the same link multiple times on the same day, and taking small Facebook breaks.
My Pinterest monthly viewers are different on my profile and my analytics.
This one I could not find an answer to anywhere, so I can only give you what I’ve gathered through experience. It appears that monthly viewers as seen on your Pinterest profile (assuming you have a business account) only update approximately bimonthly. So while your analytics numbers update every day, the “monthly viewers” found there won’t be reflected on your profile for up to 2 1/2 weeks. For example, after starting my Pinterest account for my blog it showed I only had a paltry 25 viewers for two whole weeks, the next update reflected 9k, now I’m averaging 29k per Pinterest analytics but it hasn’t updated yet.
