Do you remember the first time you considered investing big money in your blog?

When I say big money, I mean over $100. That’s big when you’re current blog income is $0.

When you haven’t made a single cent from your blogging efforts, the thought of investing is scary. After hosting, social media schedulers and Pinning tools, I was already spending money on my blog, but I hadn’t made a big investment yet

Blogs have a need. A need for speed. More importantly, blog readers have a need for speed. If your blog is slow to load, then they will not hang around for you.

My craft blog had been running for six years at the time; I had been posting daily, 300-word posts with pictures for six years. That’s a lot of memory being used on my WordPress site.

Not to mention all of the plugins and bells and whistles provided.

I read E-V-E-R-Y article going that was related to speeding up your blog. Have you ever used the chrome plugin Y-Slow? My craft blog was getting an F grade!

I deleted posts, I deleted images, removed unnecessary plugins, cleaned out my database… and moved up to an E grade.

via GIPHY

I have a certain vision for how I want my bloggy business to run.

At the heart of my vision is a fast website, that captures attention, that inspires, that promotes social sharing and interaction. How can I do that if it takes 30 seconds for my site to load?! Yes.. that is how long it was taking at one stage.

The Low-Down on The Genesis Framework

What Is The Genesis Framework

Think of it like this: If WordPress is your house, the Genesis would be the foundations, and the lovely blog or site at the end is your beautifully decorated home.

The Genesis Framework is not a WordPress theme. It’s a foundation or a Framework (as it’s known) of your WordPress website.

When you use Genesis, you are using the best foundation that your money can buy under $100.

With Genesis, I paid a one-time fee of $59 for the framework, BUT I purchased a theme at the same time. That brought the total to $189.94, but you can purchase cheaper themes than the one I had chosen at the time.

The great news is, that once you’ve purchased your Genesis Framework and first theme, you receive an exclusive discount on future themes.

What that means for you:

I know how difficult it is to hit the purchase button or make any investments, especially if your site isn’t making money yet.
For around $80, you can purchase the Genesis framework and a child theme. You will get free lifetime updates and access to all of the features and support.

However, you may not need to use the Support much.
It’s easy to navigate, easy to update, AND it’s easy to learn. Themes might have slight variations in how they operate, but the Genesis framework doesn’t change much. So your knowledge will always be useful.

Related: Boost Traffic By Using These Top Tools & Resources

Genesis Framework Updates

The Genesis Framework has a dedicated support team who happen to be the developers. Could you want any more from a support team?!

StudioPress continually update and maintain Genesis regularly; with every WordPress update, there are a Genesis updates. So that you never run into any issues.

Genesis Security

If you don’t update your sites regularly, or use a security system on your blog, you are vulnerable to hackers. Protecting your site and your content is one of your top priorities. Luckily, every new Genesis update means that your site is secure.

Related: 12 Quirky WordPress Themes To Make You Look Like A Pro

Run Multiple Sites Using Genesis

You can create and manage multiple sites, built on your Genesis Framework. It means that it’s easy to update necessary code on all of your sites without affecting the running of your site at all. No changes in text or widgets going missing.

SEO Is Easier

When it came to building Genesis, SEO was one of the top priorities. It should be one of yours too. You will have to work on SEO for every single post but because of the impeccable code, it makes SEO slightly easier.

When Google is reading your blog, it uses something called spiders to crawl through every page and post on your website. If your blog framework is full of crappy code, then it will take much longer for those spiders to crawl and that’s less than ideal.

The number one reason I went with Genesis:

Genesis Framework Makes Your Site Lightning Fast

As I mentioned above, the speed of your website is a real priority. People will not wait around for your site to load.

Ideally, your blog will load within a few seconds. Back in 2016, my blog was taking 30 seconds to load. 30!

After I installed the Genesis Framework and brand new theme, my page speed was 17 seconds. That was before we worked on deleting even more content, removing hundreds of images and optimising the pictures that were on the blog.

We managed to get the speed down even further, and I was so happy.

“You can load your website 72.3% faster.” https://www.copyblogger.com/make-wordpress-faster/ That was the exact sentence that made hit the check out button and I have zero regrets.

In the past two years, my site remains fast, I’ve rebranded, changed my theme, and doubled my monthly pageviews from 100,000 to 200,000.

Genesis is perfect for bloggers, but if you can afford to, you should definitely go with a custom built, professional website (if you’re a lawyer, big business or an accountant).

The post Why I Invested In The Genesis Framework When I Was Earning $0 appeared first on Clarity Avenue.