How To Improve Your Blog – Performance and Content
For people that have purchased web hosting and have utilized blogs for some time, you may not think that you need to change the blog design you have. As far as blog design is concerned, there are two schools of thought. The first is simple, if it isn’t broken then don’t change things up. The second is to update everything often, and keep things fresh. If you have stuck to the first example, you’re not alone. Millions of people take that world of blog design and keep things simple. If you don’t update your page and keep things fresh, you will end up losing out. If you aren’t sure whether or not it’s time to update your blog design, then you should look at these obvious signs that you need to shake things up.
Your Site Loads Like Molasses
Perhaps the first nail in the proverbial coffin of your existing blog design is in regards to speed. If your website is not loading fast, then things are terrible. Your website should not only be snappy on wireless, but it should be able to load fast on all mobile devices. Tablets and smartphones are ubiquitous, so make sure that your blog design is fast, snappy, and pushes the limits. Your website has to be fast, and there is no excuse in 2015. You may think that this is odd, but it’s true. Everyone is going towards faster connection speeds, so don’t forget that.
Another great way to speed up your website is to use a CDN service such as CloudFlare. CloudFlare is free for 1 website and allows you to take advantage of their content delivery network as well as improving your websites security protecting you from denial of service attacks.
Your Page Is Lacking Content Diversity
Here is another big nail, and that’s the issue of diversity in content. For blog design, content matters. The way that you use writing, images, videos, and so much more will help you either help your audience connect with what you’re doing, or will cause them to leave. Do you want your audience to stick around? Or do you want to be flashy with your content? If you are not cycling through a great deal of different content types, then your blog design will suffer. Even if it’s a premium template, it will lose out.
Your Designs Have Tons of Image Heavy Elements
One of the most overlooked issues that you may run into is in regards to images. There are some great blog design templates that have designs that are great. But when you put them in place, you will notice that they utilize “images” a lot more than just CSS. CSS is not bad, when done correctly. When CSS is clean, and you are using it correctly within the parameters of HTML 5 and even the antiquated XHTML elements, you will see fast loading. However, if you have a lot of images in place, you will lose speed in loading and much more. Heavy imaging to make your template work is going to cause your traffic to drop out of the sky, so don’t use that. Change things up. Blog design should not work with too much image heavy elements.
You Have Too Many Plugins Installed
This is not so much a matter of blog design, as much as it is a matter of software implementation. Do not overload your web hosting with plugins. Yes, there are some great ones out there, but you should limit the use of many of the options. You need to have a good amount in place that are not going to drag your blog design down. If you have too many of these installed, your loading time will suffer, your link generation will suffer, and your pages will not update as swiftly as you’d like them to. It’s a bad idea to have too many of these, even if you’re certain they are going to help. Chances are, you will drown out the ones that are helping.
Limiting the number of plugins you use can instantly improve performance. The less plugins you use the faster your website will load is a general rule of thumb. Only install plugins you need to operate your website. Another way to speed up your website is to disable all plugins and test your website. If the speed improved you can try enabling each plugin one by one until you find the problematic plugin, essentially a trial and error.
Broken Links Everywhere
Here is a major issue that you should look out for in terms of blog design and content marketing, links. Not just links, but rather broken or dead end links. You need to look at where you’re pointing audience members and whether or not they are hitting dead ends. This may seem like a lot of work at first glance, but it’s important to check your links and see if they are alive or dead. A blog that has a lot of dead links will stall with loading times, and will end up with diminished returns in terms of SEO. Always make sure that you check on these, and update your blog design, content and more to reflect proper changes. Otherwise, you will end up losing out big time.
A great way to find and fix broken links is to use Google Webmaster Tools. You’ll be able to identify which pages have broken links and can then take steps to correct them. It’s a free tool for webmasters and can help you find problems on your website much faster.
Improving your blogs performance takes time but if you can shave off a few seconds on page loads you’ll drastically improve all aspects of your website. If you have any other tips on improving performance let us know in the comments!
