Musings is Fun & Politics — Tech is just Tech 🙂
Most WordPress users leave LiteSpeed Cache optimization on default settings, missing free speed improvements that can boost site performance by 20-40%. If you’re running a WordPress blog on hosting that supports LiteSpeed optimization (like Hostinger, ChemiCloud, or others), you’re sitting on a goldmine of free performance improvements. The LiteSpeed Cache plugin can dramatically speed up your WordPress site with just a few simple tweaks – no technical expertise required.
I have an X premium subscription at $84 a year – LOVE it and what Elon Musk has brought to X after basically stealing it from the Progressives (they still can’t forgive him for that). I have a self-hosted blog at Hostinger that’s about $336 every 4 years (works out to about $84 a year). That’s it for my subscriptions (other than two monthly AI subscriptions to test for this post), since I live on less than the US Poverty Guidelines.
I’ve basically merged the two. X premium has an excellent AI in with that package—Grok 3. Blog posts get copied over to X composer – though I’ve started making that post more of a brief teaser rather than being copied entirely. Some of the most interesting X posts get added to the blog’s sidebar using X/Publish. Even the poor in America can have expensive hobbies – IF they manage the money right.
My Google Search Console sitemap fix journey has been a 5-day nightmare. What started as occasional frustration in Part 3 turned into constant “Couldn’t fetch” errors that nearly broke my spirit. Here’s the real story of how a clueless rookie and his highly paid AI sidekick finally beat Google’s own bug.
Full disclosure: During all this confusion and troubleshooting, I sorta lost track of time. What I describe as “24 hours” might have been overnight, and “several days” might have been one or two days. Technical problems have a way of warping your sense of time when you’re in the thick of it.
Let me be honest about something: Google Search Console sitemap troubleshooting has been my biggest challenge since Part 3 of this series. While I was celebrating climbing RankMath scores and learning SEO optimization, GSC was quietly driving me insane in the background.
This is the story of my Google Search Console sitemap troubleshooting nightmare – and how persistence, systematic detective work, and a bit of luck finally solved it.
Last week I discovered something that changed how I handle 404 errors completely. I was staring at my WordPress 404 monitor showing “category/red-hat” as a broken link. The standard advice everywhere says “just redirect it to your homepage.” But wait – someone searching for red hat content doesn’t want to land on my tech blog homepage. They want red hat information or at least an explanation of why it’s not available.
That’s when I realized the traditional 404 redirect advice creates a worse user experience, not a better one. Instead of the lazy homepage redirect, I developed what I call the “404 Retired Archive” approach using RankMath’s 404 Monitor and Redirections tools working together.
Manual SEO optimization doesn’t require costly tools or subscriptions. Often, the best solutions come from systematic troubleshooting and leveraging free tools like RankMath—exactly what happened while preparing this very post.
Yesterday, I encountered a “couldn’t fetch” error in Google Search Console that was blocking my sitemap submissions. A quick check with an AI assistant suggested I needed a robots.txt file, but the diagnosis felt incomplete. Instead of turning to additional paid tools, I used Claude to dive deeper into the issue.
The result? I discovered that RankMath’s free version wasn’t generating a virtual robots.txt file because Advanced Mode wasn’t enabled. By enabling it, I fixed both the robots.txt creation and the sitemap URL configuration. This hands-on approach showcased the power of RankMath’s free features and manual SEO optimization—solving the problem efficiently without extra costs.
This experience perfectly illustrates today’s tutorial: how to achieve professional SEO results using manual techniques and free tools like RankMath to get the job done effectively.