Experimentation Leads To Drop in Pagespeed Score

I am constantly testing new services, advertising mediums and platforms on DragonBlogger.com and recently my last combination of services I am testing have unfortunately dropped my PageSpeed Insights score from a solid 95 to like 80. I am still working on improving where I can but the limitation unfortunately comes with the number of external script calls which are made to serve up content on my site.

Particularly Incentivibe lately cost some latency as does the Lijit networks advertising and the BuySellAds banner takes over a second to render a single 125×125 ad that is hosted on their network which is pretty lousy performance wise. I am limited in my ability to cache or compress content hosted and called from external sources so I am doing everything else I can to try and improve performance until my experimentations and trials run out. Meanwhile, I am still suffering from a staggering drop in traffic and Dragon Blogger is about 30% of the traffic it used to have at the beginning of 2013, the last several months traffic is at an all time low and I can’t tell if it is Penguin, Hummingbird or just my site load times / SEO optimization issues that are really costing the traffic. I don’t have time to actually research and vest, so simply write for the sake of writing.

What I actually think is my five or six articles which generated a large source of traffic simply weren’t trends and as highly sought after anymore which affected the whole site, this is why having so much reliance on SERP traffic and too much traffic to individual posts is far worse than if you can steer that traffic to your homepage. It is so imperative to diversify traffic sources and bring in readers from Social Media, Email and Direct rather than rely completely on Google Search.

I found no penalties at all in Web Master Tools, no indication of anything amiss and my inbound links are amassing more than ever before, so I find that I just simply get lucky with some article hits and some article misses. Two things I know for sure however is that my traffic started decreasing when I switched to Suffusion WordPress theme from my Breaking News WordPress theme, and my traffic dropped when I switched to Synthesis web hosting from Bluehost Web Hosting. I don’t know if coincidence or not but my traffic slide coincided within 30 days of the theme and hosting switch. I did also change to WordPress SEO by Yoast a few months earlier and switched from Livefyre to Disqus as well. So to test I have switched back to AIO SEO to see if it does a better job choosing default descriptions and titles for my older content.

My content production has also decreased as well as site income, my AdSense has dropped by about 1/3 as a result of the traffic loss but fortunately I am still getting quite a few review articles and posts and my small GiveawayContests.net blog is starting to bring in some AdSense which helps offset a little bit (just a little).