How to Stop Worrying About Your Website

In 2018 I launched my website WP-Tweaks.com. At the time, I had just lost a major client and was worried about my future income. In the past few years, however, WP-Tweaks has taken off (thanks to Hostgator coupons), and it’s been providing me with a steady income stream for a while. However, like any website owner, I tend to fret and worry obsessively. In the beginning, this was particularly bad. I used to check my analytics every hour and constantly track my keywords. This stressed me out a lot and was impacting my quality of life. I had to find a way to stop worrying too much about my website, and this is what I’ve learned.

1. I Check My Analytics ONCE Per Day

Reading the book Antifragile by Nicholas Taleb and its predecessor “Fooled by Randomness”, made me distinguish between signals and noise. When something fluctuates wildly, then checking it infrequently dampens the noise and surfaces the real signal. So it is with analytics. The number of visitors you get in any given hour is a meaningless metric. So I restrict myself to checking my visitors only at 10:30 pm every day.

The same goes for tracking sales on my website. Instead of checking my daily sales, I only check them weekly. This prevents me from stressing out on a day to day basis and getting frightened when I don’t receive any sales on a given day. This is one way to stop worrying about the performance of your website.

2. I Stopped Tracking My Rankings all the Time

From an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) perspective, it’s very important to rank well for certain important keywords. The higher the rank, the more traffic you receive. But once you’ve done all you can, it helps to take a long break between tracking your rankings. Search engines like Google change their algorithms and run experiments all the time. Your site may drop one day, only to rise again tomorrow. It’s the long-term trend that matters and not the day to day movements.

What’s worse, the rankings data is often unproductive because there’s nothing you can do about them. Ok, so your site dropped 3 points yesterday. What are you going to do about it? Nothing! What can you do if it goes up? Again nothing! Rankings data is rarely informative, providing you’re already doing everything in your power to rank well.

This is a perfect example of the philosophy that says you should do your best and forget about the results. It applies to SEO perfectly.

3. I Learned to Detach Myself from my Website

One thing I’ve learned is to stop viewing my website as part of myself. It’s understandable when you’re the owner, to treat your site as an extension of your identity. If the site does well, it means you’re doing well. If it’s doing badly, it means you’re doing badly! Your mood and self-worth get inextricably tied to something that fundamentally doesn’t belong to you. Or more precisely, the performance of the website doesn’t belong to you because you can’t control whether people see it or not.

You control the contents of your site, and that’s it. Nothing more. Whether Google thinks it’s good is another matter. You can try your best to rank well on Google and feel proud of your efforts. But you can’t feel good about the results. Because the results are not up to you.

This hasn’t been easy. Especially since I’ve poured so much work and sweat into my website. It’s natural to want to be rewarded for your efforts. But the rewards for work are internal. You feel glad that you worked so hard, and that should be enough. Whether or not the world appreciates your hard work is irrelevant. You don’t control the world. And to internalize this is to be free of worry for your website.

Bottom Line

If you’re like me, and you obsess over the performance of your site, I hope these few tips help you improve the situation. Good luck!

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