To redo or not to redo? (site structure questions)

I'd like to hear some suggestions regarding effective site structure and advice on how you would proceed in my case.

Like all of us, I want my "where to find, buy, review and purchase" pages to have great rankings. But first I need to make sure my own site is giving it the appropriate love, before I can expect search engines to do the same.

That said, what is your most effective site structure for the "money pages" when you don't actually have a product? (affiliate sales)

My current setup (I believe) might be a catastrophe. But I will describe it so you can make some suggestions.

Category situation:
First of all it is a "pretty" general Blog. I have about 10 different categories and 7 are related. 3 are just different.
Example Categories: SUV's, Sedans, Sports Cars, Motor Cycles, Scooters, Pick up Trucks, Jeeps then I have : Puppies, Hunting and General (LOL)

Site Layout:
It's setup as a blog. So the homepage IS the blog page. No static homepage. The menu is the categories

Url Structure Example:
Mysite.com/hunting/best-bear-repellent

Situation:
Light traffic, 10-20 organic visits a day, sometimes! not much in sales although made my first affiliate sale yesterday after a LONG dry spell.

Rankings: A bunch of decent keywords floating around page 2-4 a bunch more pages 5-10. By decent I mean, decent volume and more importantly intent. Then I have a handful of low volume "review" keywords on page 1.

So, what do YOU do to maximize the pages that you would like to improve, assuming the content is already on point but the site itself is not.

I will find the top competitors’ websites and imitate their website structure. This is right.

Getwhatchuwant said:

Situation:
Light traffic, 10-20 organic visits a day, sometimes! not much in sales although made my first affiliate sale yesterday after a LONG dry spell.

Rankings: A bunch of decent keywords floating around page 2-4 a bunch more pages 5-10. By decent I mean, decent volume and more importantly intent. Then I have a handful of low volume "review" keywords on page 1.

Click to expand...

Are you going grow any bigger?
If yes, better start now than regretting it later.

Nothing is really wrong with your website structure,
you don't have to make a static homepage to rank and having the categories in the menu is good to go as well,
it's basically a standard blog structure and it works pretty well for thousands of websites

If you're aiming for the right keywords and publishing the right content, you'll rank eventually,
just give it some time and make sure to make proper keyword research and build the necessary links to rank for such keywords

if the domain has anything to do with cars I would remove the non-car categories (puppies, hunting) and turn it into an automotive-oriented site.... especially if the articles rankings are about cars.

If the articles ranking are not about cars (but the domain name still is about cars).... well, that's one tough choice to make. I'd probably not even do anything with it anymore and let it expire... or turn it into churn & burn. I don't know, I'd rather not have to make that decision

If the articles ranking are not about cars and the domain is also not about cars you might want to get rid of the car-related categories and only keep the categories and articles that are relevant to your domain's name and topic (if there is any topic to begin with)

tazarbm said:

if the domain has anything to do with cars I would remove the non-car categories (puppies, hunting) and turn it into an automotive-oriented site.... especially if the articles rankings are about cars.

If the articles ranking are not about cars (but the domain name still is about cars).... well, that's one tough choice to make. I'd probably not even do anything with it anymore and let it expire... or turn it into churn & burn. I don't know, I'd rather not have to make that decision

If the articles ranking are not about cars and the domain is also not about cars you might want to get rid of the car-related categories and only keep the categories and articles that are relevant to your domain's name and topic (if there is any topic to begin with)

Click to expand...

It does have some decent ranking in non car categories

so what I ended up doing is making a static homepage and kept the posts on the front page that have some keywords movement as "featured" posts

the categories are still the menu and there is no url structure change.

only thing that is really different is I have 10-12 of the best performing posts stuck on the front page instead of falling further and further down the blog.

I also switched to astra and elementor (from generatepress) but surprisingly the site is a little slower now.

Anyone run this setup and what is there (non-paid) setup to get the speed right? (shared hosting, hostgator)