The New Travel Bunny Blog After 3 Months of Improved Speed & Design

Hi, everyone! Long time no read, huh? You haven’t really seen any articles by me in the recent blog posts, but don’t worry, I’ve been quite a busy bee. You’ve probably seen the new Travel Bunny look, but here’s a shortlist with what I’ve been up to:

• I’ve worked on the budget travel details, where I’ll keep adding travel costs for popular travel destinations from around the world, starting with Europe. It’s a bit of a grind (any gamers here?) to go through it all country by country, but I think the information will prove useful to many budget travelers.
• I’ve switched to the new Travel Bunny design. It took me a couple of months to get everything ready on a localhost server, and I’m still not done with getting everything live now. That’s because this process not only included a change of look but also a lot of optimization:
  • I’ve edited thousands of photos to get them to the new theme’s sizes (pixels) and reduced them (kilobytes) to improve site speed. Not all those photos are up yet, though, I still have to go through all the older posts and do the switch.
  • I’ve personalized the sidebars to better fit the content of each page and post, and to provide you with related article suggestions or tools (e.g. currency converter on the travel costs pages). There are still some articles that have a basic sidebar, like this one, but that’s only because they’re solitary ones so far. Their sidebars will become richer in time when more content on the same subject will become available on the travel blog. And it will!
  • I’ve added pins with descriptions, wherever they were missing. The new theme’s width now allows me to have 3 pins/post with sidebar, so I will have a lot of new pins to add to older content. I also began associating a pin for each post and page through the sharing plugin I use. (The other pins are accessible for everyone using the Pinterest browser extension.)
  • There’s been a lot of coding. From some changes to the CSS stylesheet to the codes for the index meta description, all the applicable Schema, Open Graph, Twitter Summary Card, and Dublin Core. Plus some extra functions in PHP to improve reader experience. I still have some work to do on the header, I’m not pleased with it yet, especially for the mobile display. And I have a checklist with all the places I need to add the option to subscribe to the newsletter, but I won’t activate everything everywhere because I would find it too intrusive for you, the readers.
  • I’ve set up 240 redirects so far. I’ve gone through cleaning the posts and pages links to make them shorter. And I’ve cleaned all the categories and tags, to remove those that weren’t relevant enough. This will also help me optimize the existing ones better, in time.
  • I’ve also reassessed the plug-ins of the new Travel Bunny blog, removed several of them, and made some adjustments to the ones I kept.
  • I managed to improve the site speed and some technical SEO optimization aspects, but there’s still some work to be done, particularly for mobile.
  • I improved the Travel Bunny’s accessibility, for those of you who use screen readers. I’m very happy about that!
  • I worked on adding a shop on the new Travel Bunny blog. It should go live tomorrow. This will allow me to add affiliate products that I tried and recommend and/or travel deals that you can take advantage of easily. It will provide a smoother look for in-article inserts, while also giving you the option to browse through everything I find worthy of buying in one place. However, I also intend to add some free products in the shop (e.g. printables and IG story templates).
  • I updated the Privacy Policy to make it more comprehensive. I also checked that the Terms and Conditions were up to date, especially with the shop going live soon.
  • The new Travel Bunny blog will be bilingual. I am working on translating the entire website into Romanian. But to provide Romanian and Moldavian users with the best possible experience, I’m doing this by hand, instead of using an automated option. It will be more work for me, it will take some more patience from you, but the end result is worth the wait, I promise!
• Mathieu and I went on holiday to Romania. We covered a lot of ground and there’s a lot to tell. Starting next week, you should find out more about this summer’s latest travel adventures.
• I have two new collaborations on the new Travel Bunny blog. One of them is with NayoSmart, a company that has these amazing backpacks that Mathieu and I got to test during our road trip through Romania. If you come back to the blog tomorrow, you’ll get to see what I’m talking about!
• The Travel Bunny got nominated for an Infinity Blog Award in the Best Travel Blog category. I’m amazed by how many people voted for The Travel Bunny so far, I’m really grateful for all your support!

So that’s about it. I’m sorry I haven’t been that active on the blog, but thanks to our guest bloggers I was still able to provide you with valuable travel content. I still have some guest posts that are scheduled to go out starting Friday, so stay tuned and return for updates soon.

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What do you think of the new Travel Bunny look?

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About the author of the old and new Travel Bunny

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