Undoubtedly, the many fans of KTracy.com are wondering why we're not updating the website as often. The team at KTracy.com has decided that we owe you an explanation.

The current, static form of KTracy.com was a re-imagining of the golden era of KTracy.com when everything was written in HTML. There was some extensive work that went into making this happen and we had two goals with this mission. Primarily, to speed up KTracy.com to make the website more attractive to search engines in a process termed "Search Engine Optimization" or SEO. The second reason was because Kevin Tracy is bored with and painfully detests WordPress.

Returning to our golden era format was ultimately a great move. Since we began this project in March, web traffic from monthly unique visitors to KTracy.com has grown a whopping 460% despite having less content and a slightly outdated web design. This traffic has been driven largely by search engines; which indicates the success of using fast-loading static web design for SEO.

The most prominent change has been in our search engine order. We've moved up to the first or second spot when searching for "Kevin Tracy" in most major search engines; which beats being lost 4 pages deep in the listings. The entire KTracy.com staff is particularly thrilled about this.

However, since April when the experiment began, something happened that the team at KTracy.com had failed to predict: the insanely handsome Kevin Tracy got even busier! He's not only begun dating someone, but he's taking extensive dance lessons and resumed woodworking after a long hiatus due to outrageous wood prices among other things.

Although Mr. Tracy still sought to create content for the site, writing new content in HTML and manually uploading web-scaled images to the correct directory on the FTP from his cell phone proved impossible.

Additionally, Kevin Tracy has been relying on Instagram to post updates about his life and sales from the KTracy.com store. His desire to quickly upload a picture online cannot be fulfilled without a CMS.

Even with these problems, KTracy.com still has not managed to shake itself free of WordPress. Because of our reliance on WooCommerce, the official Kevin Tracy Store needs to use WordPress as its CMS. To make matters worse, the insane amount of time it takes to create new content for KTracy.com as a static website means that Kevin Tracy and our team have had less time to work on getting the store up to par. Although store traffic has remained somewhat steady, the lack of products have led to a small decrease in sales.

Because of all of this, Kevin Tracy, with a heavy heart, has directed us to develop a transition plan to move the overwhelming majority of our content back to WordPress with a WooCommerce installation and IndieWeb integration. Mr. Tracy has insisted that we don't make the move without a high degree of confidence that we can radically speed up WordPress' performance from what we experienced in 2020. Additionally, using some static HTML/PHP/CSS pages to increase loadtimes may be acceptable if we can find a way to syncronize menus between the sites. We suspect we'll accomplish this by manually coding the menus rather than relying on built-in WordPress functions.

More technical details will be released later as plans begin to develop more firmly.