Many wordpress pundits tell you that to draw visitors, you need a compelling front page, also known as a landing page or home page. I was using the default wordpress home page of the most recent posts.
It turned out that to create an attractive static front page, I had to transition from the WordPress Twenty Sixteen theme to Twenty Seventeen. This gives me full-width page templates for the front page, so that I do not get the top or side menus. It was also necessary to go full-width in order to use a page builder like Elementor.
Elementor is an exceptionally powerful free WordPress plugin. It has templates to create some very elegant webpages, which I obviously eschewed in favor of being more densely packed and informative, with few images. I apologize for the choice of colors, but the color picker in Elementor is not as controllable as Adobe. After a certain amount of frustration, I gave up and settled.
I also came across a bug in the use of tabs, and I wish Elementor used relative links within wordpress. I also discovered that the Elementor full-width static front page does not render the Google Analytics and Adsense tracking codes in header.php. I instead had to insert those tracking codes into the header of the new front page.
But other than that, I found the Elementor Page Builder plugin helped me create something different and surely more eye-catching. I’m going to track my google analytics to see how these changes affect my website traffic.
As always, if you have a question, use the Contact Me page.
Update May-9-2020:
A few months ago, I decided that the Elementor homepage was too slow. The WordPress Guttenberg editor allows me to duplicate most of the function of the Elementor page. It’s not as glitzy, but it gets the job done and seems to be faster.
Update Jan-3-2024:
After being on the WordPress Twenty Twenty theme for 3.5 years, I was forced to migrate to a full block theme. The reason I was “forced” to migrate was that in WP 6.4.2, I could no longer edit the copyright in one of the footers. I couldn’t even get to that footer to edit it. After a little research, I learned that widgets would not be supported much longer, and I needed to go to a full block theme with a Full Site Editor (FSE). I chose the Twenty Twenty Four theme.
It turned out that FSE was a major change, and the whole transition is taking me a week of effort. I had to redesign the home page, and it turned out that WP doesn’t like my use of thumbnails throughout. So I had to muck around with the page templates. There are still design things I couldn’t fix, so pleae report as you come across them.
I decided to also double-check grammar and tags, and to take the Trailer links in my 450+ posts and embed them as videos. This was the biggest task, because it turned out that I think 40-50% of the trailer links had disappeared or been made private, or linked to something else with tons of advertising. I had always assumed that what goes on youtube stays on youtube, so I got whacked badly for that wrong assumption. Oh well.