Motorhome Vagabond

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Motorhome Vagabond is my travel blog that dates back to 2010. It’s always been based on WordPress but the theme used and design has changed over the years.

I recently updated the look which is based on one of the templates provided by Kadence. Normally I don’t use templates but when there is one that seems perfect it saves time to use it as a starting point. I no longer live the van life but the website still receives regular traffic.

  • Motorhome Vagabond Project
  • Motorhome Vagabond Phone Mockup

This recent redesign was more of a fun project in some spare time. The website has existed for over a decade. I never liked the last design but since it was a ‘hobby’ site my business websites took priority. I finally managed to find the time to change the design and delete some old posts etc.

To save time I used a template from the Kadence starter templates website. The only issue was that the default template home page was over 7MB in size! This is often the problem with templates, they will often have sections that pull in images at full size from posts when they are only displayed as a small image on the actual home page.

After cleaning up some sections the final home page was 1.7MB and when I get around to changing two more images I hope to have the size below 1.5MB. At the same time I carried out a number of admin tasks on this blog. When themes change over time you can end up with an image database that contains more than 10 different sizes for each image uploaded. This is now down to 4, the original size and 3 others that WordPress creates. Some old blog posts were also deleted that were not really relevant or had old, poor images. In each case a 410 redirect was used to inform Google that the post had gone.

I’m finally happy with the look of this website. It still receives regular traffic and I plan to improve existing blog posts and write some new ones in order to increase monthly traffic from Google. If time allows I will also attempt to build some backlinks as the website was ignored once I gave up van life and started to focus on my pet businesses.

Page Speed Results

How fast your website loads is now a Google ranking factor. We only use Kadence theme because it’s fast. We only recommend WordPress hosting that supports Lightspeed for best results. The following speed results were obtained from Pingdom.