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20 Comments

  1. Hi Eb. Great post and site with lots of useful tips! I’m fairly new to blogging and am very happy with my Pipdig theme. But I’ve still had to tweek it and no doubt there are things I can do to improve my site.

    I’m an artist and I’m surprised at the amount of creative friends who still opt for free themes. And who try to spend as little as possible on their sites as a whole and won’t consider self-hosting. It’s such a false economy, plus setting up by yourself isn’t as hard as they may think.

    1. Hi Emerald! Thanks so much for your kind comments. Oh I love Pipdig themes – I have a good blogging friend who has a Pipdig theme and it is GORGEOUS!! Ooh I have just had a sneaky peep at your site – BEAUTIFUL!! Totally agree about free themes/not being self-hosted is a false economy. When you compare the costs to what you would have to pay if you were setting up a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ business it’s tiny, but yet the rewards are huge – so much more professional, as well as being a better reader experience and better for your SEO too. And yes, setting up a self-hosted blog is waaay easier than it sounds! Eb 🙂

  2. Oh, how I wish you’d written this when I first moved from Blogger to WordPress. I didn’t give most of this a thought. But I’m now thinking it’s time to update my theme, so I’m looking at Restored 316 themes now. I’ve done the quiz and Divine has been recommended. Will use your affiliate link if I do go down this route.

    1. Hahaha – if I could have a pound for every time someone had said that to me!! So pleased you found it useful. I really recommend R316 themes – they are so good! Really designed with serious blogging and running an online business in mind. Aw, that’s so kind of you – thank you! Eb x

  3. Hi Eb, my hubby is out this evening so I’m spending an exciting Friday night researching themes. I’ve just done the quiz and it’s recommended Divine too! I’m going to do a bit more research and make a decision soon. An update is definitely overdue for my site anyway. x

    1. Hi Corina, Oooh exciting times. Shopping for a new theme is so much fun! I really do recommend Divine and all the R316 themes. They are so good. Not only do they look pretty, but they are very customisable and have great functionality too. Can’t wait to see what you do! Eb x

  4. I want to thank you for the extremely valuable content you provide! I just used your affiliate link to purchase my theme at Refined316! I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

  5. I bit the bullet and bought a theme for my very small, still young food blog (went through R316 with your link). I’m still trying to get Google to index my pages but thankfully they are indexing more and more of them. Since installing the theme, though, Google Search Console now shows about 40 pages without indexing which were part of the theme. Demo posts, fake categories, etc. I deleted all the demo posts, pages, categories, and tags when I implemented the theme, but they are still showing up on GSC. How do I remove them from Google so they don’t count against my pages being indexed? (Those pages don’t even exist anymore, but I can’t figure out how to tell Google that.)

  6. Your posts are SO helpful, thanks Eb!! I finally named my blog & got set up on SiteGround (using your link of course! *cheeky wink*) and am Theme-Shopping! I don’t know what I would do without the action-plan you’ve provided!! So much to think of. Thanks for all the help!!! Cheers! -Lyla

  7. I am slowly working your way through your articles and they’ve been really very insightful as i prepare for a travel blog. Tried looking around R316/Pipdig for some themes for a travel blog and am so overwhelmed at so many options. What’s the best way to narrow down options or something suitable for travel (eg your limoncella theme seems to be catering specifically to food blogs – how do i search for one that may cater to travel?)

    1. Hi Tommy, great to hear you’ve been finding my articles helpful! I totally understand about themes – it can be really tricky to choose. The great thing about Restored 316 themes is that they are super flexible and with tons of customization options… so even something like the Limoncella theme could look great as a travel blog. And that ‘feminine’ style can be made to look ‘neutral’ or ‘masculine’ with some very small changes. That said, Lauren at R316 has created a theme specifically for Travel bloggers in mind – called Journey https://shop.restored316designs.com/product/journey-theme-kadence/ Hope that helps!

  8. Hi Eb! I have a food blog like you and am deciding between the Feast Plugin and Restored 316. May I ask why you chose Restored 316 over Feast? Thank you! 🙂

    1. Good question! There are a few reasons. Firstly, from what I understand, Feast is quite inflexible, so there are a lot of restrictions on what you can and can’t do. So a good example of this would be I have a person in my membership program who couldn’t even create a simple tripwire page because Feast wouldn’t let her create any kind of landing page. Contrast that with R316, which is super flexible and better still, they have a funnel add-on with all the ready made landing pages you could wish for! Secondly, as far as I understand, Feast is very much geared to ‘speed at all costs’ as if speed is the only UX concern. Whereas there is quite a body of evidence to show that readers also care quite a lot about aesthetics… and quite a lot of evidence to show that above a certain level, speed gains deliver very little additional benefit. R316 themes are reasonably fast (though not as fast as Feast), but much more beautiful and professional looking IMHO. Finally – and this one was really a clincher for me – all Feast sites look very similar. I do not want my site to look virtually identical to hundreds of other food blogs! R316 offers so many opportunities to customize your blog that you can truly make it your own, and some of the newer themes look like the kind of thing you could only normally get if you paid top dollar for a bespoke theme. So 100% if I was starting a new food blog today I’d go with R316. Hope that helps!

  9. Thank you so much! The final point about all Feast blogs looking similar was one of the biggest reasons I hesitated to go with Feast haha. Site speed and SEO optimization were concerns I had about Restored 316, so I’m glad to hear good things about them from you. I think I’ll go with them. Thanks again for your response!

    1. You are very welcome! Site speed is just one small part of SEO optimization… there is so much more to SEO and most of it has absolutely nothing to do with the theme you choose. All too often I see bloggers go down a site speed rabbit hole and not focusing enough on the other aspects of SEO. And, as I said before, UX is more than just speed. The problem with speed is it’s something that can be easily ‘measured’ which is why people get obsessed with it, whereas other aspects of UX and SEO are not so easily measured, which is why they can often get neglected – even if they are just as important, if not more so!

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