I broke my website and here’s how I am going to fix it

Aargh! I broke my website, and now I have to fix it!

If you’ve followed me for a long time, you know that I used to blog as Magnolia2Mumbai. Well, it seems that when I moved to my jeanspraker.com domain, that I did not quite follow website domain transfer best practices, and I broke my website.

Specifically, I broke the photos. Big time. Any post published before that transfer now has broken image links. All you see is the alt text. And let me tell you: the alt text is not great.

Initially, this break was not obvious to me or anyone else. I had maintained the old domain for a long time. As long as I maintained the Magnolia2Mumbai domain, the site just redirected to the photos. No biggie. Sure, it slowed down my website, but who cares, right?

Well, evidently Google cares. And my readers care. And, honestly, I should care. I am a marketing professional after all.

Spoiler alert, dear reader, I did not care. This website has always been a random collection of my thoughts. I wasn’t really worried about things like SEO or image quality or any of that stuff.

But the truth is that my website is my digital front door, just like your website is your digital front door.

If you google me, it’s the number 3 result. Technically, my website should probably be my top result. It’s OK that it’s not. But more about that later.

As I was saying, my website broke, and now I need to fix it.

How to fix my website in 5 simple steps

1. Unpublish the broken blog posts.
   I have already done this step. Yes, it means that all my India content is gone. But, don’t worry, it will be back soon. I promise. Mostly.
2. Decide which blogs to republish.
   I will decide this after creating a content strategy for the website. And an SEO strategy. And a social media strategy. OK, look, I have some work to do before I get to this step. Do you want see how I do it? Great. I will share my experience with you.
3. Update the old blog post and images.
   This will be the toughest and most tedious part of the process. Optimizing the old blog posts for SEO will probably mean making a few significant revisions, and finding some of the images may not be the easiest task. In some cases, I may decide to use different images.
4. Write a new blog post about why I decided to keep the old blog post.
   The strategy behind this is simple: it creates internal links. The new blog will link to the old blog, and the old blog will link to the new one. And voila, that little Yoast SEO smiley face will turn green and stop frowning at me. 😡>😁
5. Republish the old content and the new blog.
   If I really have my shit together, these will happen simultaneously.

I will keep you posted on my progress!