You can improve your blog functionality in order to improve your traffic, readership and the number of people that comment on your blog posts. When you improve your blog functionality, it can have a profound impact on the capabilities of your blog. Here are some tips to improve your blog functionality by making small tweaks and improvements to how your blog works.
Improve Your Blog Tip #1 – Install a plugin to track top commenters.
One way that you can reward the readers that are participating in your blog as well as to encourage other people to get involved is to install a plugin for top commenters, which works for WordPress blogs. This is going to put a little box on your sidebar with the names and the links to the commentors that have had the most participation in your blogs to give them a little big of recognition.
Improve Your Blog Tip #2 – Customize the sidebar on your blog pages.
When did you last make any modifications to your sidebar? The chances are, the people who regularly read your blog will have grown accustomed to what is already there, and they probably completely tune your sidebar content out as a result. From time to time, it may benefit you significantly to change things up just a bit, adding new features or new content to your sidebar.
Improve Your Blog Tip #3 – Separate your trackbacks from your comments.
Most blogs are displaying their pingbacks and their trackbacks along with comments from the blog’s readers. They may be helpful in showing your readers that other people find your content to be valuable but they can also actually get in the way, interfering with conversations that are going on throughout your comments section. There is a simple way to separate these things in WordPress, so if you use WordPress, make sure to separate your trackbacks and your pingbacks from your regular blog comments.
Improve Your Blog Tip #4 – Adjust and improve the about page of your blog.
Some of the people that read your blog are going to want to visit your About page so that they can find out more information about you. When was the last time that you took the time and made the effort to update this page? Make sure that you are taking a look at how effective it really is when it comes to communicating with your readers.
Improve Your Blog Tip #5 – Add a sitemap to your blog website.
Users can really benefit when you have a sitemap available to them. WordPress users can make use of a sitemap generator plugin that allows a sitemap page to be designed that lists out all blog posts and pages for easy access.
When it comes to creating and writing in a blog, one of the most important questions that a lot of first time bloggers find themselves asking is whether or not they should do any advertising. The truth is, there is never really a situation where advertising is bad, as long as you are advertising in the right way. There are a multitude of different ways that you can advertise on your blog, including advertising to bring people to your blog, and advertising on your blog to generate revenue through your blogging endeavor. Both of these forms of advertising have benefits, but they also have a small selection of drawbacks as well.
Advertising to Gain Traffic –
Advertising for the purpose of gaining traffic may mean search engine optimization, posting content to article submission websites, putting your blog link in your e-mail signature and finding other ways to spread the word about your blog. One of the most advantageous ways to attract people to your blog is to socialize, commenting in other blogs and facilitating conversations in a way that will attract people back to yours.
The Advantage –
The advantage to advertising your blog is obviously, as it will attract an increase in traffic and readership to your content, attracting more people to see what you are writing. There are plenty of ways to advertise your blog, and many of them are inexpensive or completely free.
The Disadvantage -
The disadvantage to advertising your blog is the fact that it can take away from the time you need to keep your blog updated. Luckily, many forms of advertising your blog can be done simply by writing in it and socializing through it, so you should not feel like you are limited in how much advertising you can do.
This is another excellent reason to advertise because it allows you to generate money from your blog through advertising. If you want to make a little money back from your blogging effort, find out more about affiliate marketing, AdSense and other forms of advertising for monetization.Advertising to Monetize your Blog –
The Advantage –
You can make back the costs for your blog website and can even generate some extra money on the side without doing much work. Simply writing relevant content will do much of the advertising for you.
The Disadvantage -
Some readers are put off by obvious advertisements. If your blog pages are overloaded with adverts, you may be overwhelming your readers, which can chase them away. Make sure that your ads are visible, but not overwhelmingly so.
Once you know the ins and outs of advertising through blogging, and the advantages and disadvantages associated with each, you can make smart decisions regarding whether or not your blogging endeavor needs a little bit of advertising.
Traffic is one of the most difficult things to get as an affiliate. How do you get it without wasting your money and how do you get traffic that actually converts into sales or leads? One thing is absolutely clear to any affiliate who gets started promoting products: it’s virtually impossible to make money without a substantial stream of consistent and targeted traffic. Some methods and channels are more effective than others. Let’s take a look at the most effective ways to get traffic to affiliate sites, without going crazy in the process.
Method #1 – Web 2.0 Marketing. What are these exactly? It’s a blanket category that includes everything from article directories like Ezinearticles.com to social and informative sites like Hubpages or Squidoo. These sites can be used to promote your site by building valuable and informative content and then linking back to your main site. If all goes well your web 2.0 properties will rank well in the search engines, get traffic and then you can help direct that traffic from your web 2.0 properties right to your “money” site. You can use these web properties to pre-sell the traffic and get them warmed up for a full on sales pitch, so in many ways this is superior to just sending paid traffic straight to a landing page or blog.
Method #2 – Pay Per Click Marketing. This comes in many different forms. You can purchase traffic through pay per click networks like Google Adwords or even purchase banner space on a site that gets traffic related to your audience or demographic. The idea here is to instantly get traffic, but you pay a premium for it. The only way to make this work is to earn more then you’re spending on traffic. The difference becomes your profit. In many ways you’re simply brokering traffic when you get into paid traffic sources but this is arguably one of fastest and most efficient ways to make big paydays online. Some of the most popular pay per click networks is Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo! Small Business Advertising.
Method #3 – Viral Reports. A great way to get more traffic and get attention that draws in even more traffic is to go viral. This is easier said than done, but once it’s done right it works for years to drive traffic. Depending on your niche write up a short PDF report you can give away on your blog or via mailing list and encourage people to give it away and distribute it. Throughout the report include links back to your site and maybe even an affiliate link. If you put effort into making a quality report that answers a lot of questions or solves a problem, you can expect the report to get distributed and draw in more traffic to your site.
Whether you are blogging for business applications, or for personal growth, the process of writing daily is a rewarding activity in many ways. The individual writer is able to benefit from the satisfaction that is gained from personal reflection. Blogs afford the writer the means to distribute information and ideas everywhere the internet can reach. For the business, blogs enable a conduit within which real time feedback and communication with customers can occur, as well as dissemination of information in order to bolster a company’s credibility with peers and customers.
When it comes to writing a blog, there are various techniques that one can employ. One such technique is the implementation of Search Engine Optimization methods, where by the blog is ranked higher in search engines through manipulation of how the algorithms work. This is usually done by careful cross linking, adding blog keywords, including terms similar in meaning, and other similar steps.
Choosing the keywords for blog posts can also serve to provide focus to writing. Knowing the keywords for a blog’s post of the day will enable you to make sure your post stays on point. You can also use the keywords to make sure that you are not very repetitive, by avoiding using the same keywords constantly. You can use the keywords to ensure that your posts cover a variety of topics, even within a particular area of interest.
Another writing tip is to make sure you are posting in great frequency, with at least a post a day. If that cannot be managed, then one should at the very least shoot for a couple of posts over a week. Traffic to a blog tends to be proportionate to how often one posts in the blog. The posts should have value and be interesting and relevant. One should not write just to write, there should be meat to blog postings.
The average web reader will have 96 seconds worth of focus. That means they will read your posts for only about a minute and a half. So blog posts should be short and to the point, making sure that the most important information appears at the beginning. Well written posts will captivate the interest of the readers, and be within three to six hundred words in length.
In line with keeping posts short, limit posts to one important topic. Scatter shot posting will fail to keep interest for very long. Rather, the successful blogger will keep postings focused on single points. If there are multiple directions you wish to cover, turn them into blog posts, and distribute them over the week. This will help to make sure that postings stay regular, especially during those patches of time where writers block can hit.
One of the most important decisions the blogger can make is the domain and blog titles. This is essentially branding, creating a name that is memorable to your readers and will give them avenue to keep returning to your blog. It should be on point, related to the theme of your blog, and well thought out.
Most of the open source blogging platforms out there are going to come with at least a few different basic blogging designs. Some platforms call them themes, others call them templates, and others still have completely unique names for them. Most of these basic themes or templates have nothing inherently wrong with them, but customization is somewhat necessary otherwise everyone would have a blog that looked exactly the same as every other blog. Most blogging templates are really basic, and adding your own flair to them is easy. Still, many people get the whole customization thing wrong, and need to be steered in the right direction. There are some basic mistakes to how people go about customizing their blogs, and hopefully we can dispel some of them in this series on principles for good blog design.
1 – Whether you really want to or not, it is vital that you have some information about *you* in the blog. Either create an about me page, or have some information about yourself displayed in the sidebar of your blog. This should be a prominently placed section so it can be easily found, and it should be truly about who you are, rather than read like a resume.
2 – Make sure that your personal contact information is readily available, and even more importantly, easily visible. You need to at least have an e-mail address visible, and a phone number would be even better. If you want to prevent spammers from harvesting your e-mail address, use an image to display it rather than text. You can always use a free web based e-mail address such as a yahoo, gmail or hotmail address to keep from having your true personal address displayed, if you like. By posting real contact information, you are going to make yourself appear much more real. Although people may not really find reasons to contact you, you’re still indicating to your readers that you are available, which is a good thing.
3 – You should absolutely include a picture of yourself in your blog. All blogs, even business blogs, are personal, and the people who visit yours are going to want to know who you are and what you look like so that they can get to know you, and can benefit from the personal nature of your blog. It is much easier to build trust between yourself and your readers if your picture is visible and your readers feel like they know you. You do not absolutely need a picture, but it is still strongly recommended that you do have one in order to get the most out of your blog.
4 – Some of your blog posts are going to be more popular than others. Once you recognize which blog posts these are, keep them from being buried by finding a way to highlight them.
If you want to keep readers coming back to your website, you should produce fresh blog posts to keep their interest. Look to the biggest sites, what they all have in common is that they constantly produce content that is new and fresh. This is also what the webmasters of the blog will say is the most difficult thing. Producing content that is fresh and frequent is a challenge that, once overcome, will take your blog to a new level.
There are a number of things that can help you in producing content that is fresh. The first is to make sure that your posts are kept brief. Trying to consistently put out 500 word posts will quickly burn you out, with the time that is taken. Many good blogs have many posts that are short. The average attention span of the internet reader is about a minute and a half. Short blog posts will be refreshing for the readers who may not have the time to read very long blog posts.
Another thing that is good for keeping content fresh is to prepare a backup stash of articles, or a working queue. This sort of action is especially good for those who may find themselves suffering from writers block. The premise is to write articles before you need them. You may have a stash of articles for when you are blocked, or you may have a stack of articles that you add to, and pull content from, following a schedule planned in advance.
Some blogs will invite their readers to be guest bloggers. This will not only introduce ideas from your readers, which can act as a muse for your posts, but it will also encourage participation from your blog readers. Interaction is a surefire way to create a sense of community with your readers. Reader interaction is also good because some great blog posts stem from conversations in the comments section. Let us not forget the biggest benefit to guest bloggers, one less blog post for you to write.
Guest bloggers do not have to readers. Rather, you can find a blogger who is within the same genre or niche. Inviting these bloggers to contribute can enable you to form professional relationships with other bloggers. These relationships can encourage the growth of ideas through conversations. Many times, guest bloggers from other blogs will also allow you to write for their blog. This gives you and them access to each others readers, bolstering the traffic to both blogs.
Sometimes the best way to ensure fresh content is to blog in teams. A team of bloggers may run a single blog or many. The idea is that the bloggers will share in blogging duties, so that if one can not contribute for a period of time, the others can take up the slack and ensure that fresh content is produced. Such an agreement between bloggers will require less work for the bloggers, and give a number of different views within the content.
Producing content that is fresh is how you will ensure that your blog flourishes.
Google has purchased Waze, the company that makes the popular social traffic app, but did not disclose terms of the deal.
Google confirmed the purchase in a blog post on Tuesday: “The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now. We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.”
Facebook was also reportedly interested in buying Waze for a price of around $1 billion.
Most businesses today recognize the power of blogging and are using it to their advantage. Everyone from the bigger companies to much smaller businesses are taking advantage of the free advertising and wonderful increase to website traffic that can be gained from successful blogging. There are some mistakes that you should avoid if you are blogging for your business. Unfortunately, these mistakes have been learned the hard way, but you can learn to avoid these mistakes before they happen to you.
The most common mistake that people who are Internet marketing make is only blogging when there is available time. Anyone who is working in Internet marketing knows that there is no extra time and blogging must be scheduled. If you want your blogging efforts to be successful, you must blog with consistency. The readers of your blog will soon become tired of waiting for the next time you have available time to update your blog and move on. This is lost traffic for you that may never return again.
Poorly written content on your blog makes you sound unprofessional. A blog is intended to establish you as an expert. How much of an expert can you be if the content of your blog is full of grammar and spelling mistakes? Take a little time to go over the content before you post it to make sure that the typos are all corrected and everything is grammatically correct. This will protect your image as an expert in your field.
Allow your blog readers to comment on your content. Many people are so afraid of negative comments that they simply don’t allow them at all. Blog readers love to have the ability to voice their own opinion on the content on your blog. If they find that they can’t comment, they will simply move on from your blog to one that allows them to make comments. You can always filter the comments and approve the ones that you want. At least your readers will have the option.
Your blog must link to your website or products that you are selling online. Why do you have a blog? Chances are it is to sell your product and increase the traffic to your website. However, if you don’t link to your website and finish the job, you are just wasting your time and effort.
Do not stuff your blog with keywords. They must flow through the content naturally or people will see the blog as nothing more than a piece of marketing material. Quality marketing does not appear to be marketing and a sales pitch should never sound like a sales pitch. The readers of your blog should be interested in the content and never feel as though they are being marketed to or you will lose them.
If you learn these mistakes and avoid them like the plague, you will increase the traffic to your website and gain the business that you want and need. It is very competitive online and avoiding these mistakes will avoid some very costly mistakes.
Whether your blog is about general interest topics like how you washed a crayon in your son’s pocket and there’s a new bank going up in town, or you have a niche blog designed to make money, the same basic blogging strategies apply if you want to be a top blogger.
Post Regularly: You don’t have to post every day. But if you can, do it. Post every other day or 3 or 4 times a week. The more regularly you post (especially if you have good SEO optimized titles) the better your blog will look to the search engines.
Post In-Depth: If you post every day and you’re not fond of writing, this might be difficult. But maybe you can do it twice a week, or even once, and have shorter posts the rest of the time. If your post is long and full of information that almost always makes it better than a short post. First, it’ll contain more keywords and probably help your search engine listings. Second, it’ll contain more information that might lead others to different parts of your blog if you’re linking correctly. And finally, a long post just gives you more space in which to connect with your reader.
Post for the Readers: Search engine optimization is important if you want people to be able to find you through search engines. But if your blog post reads like it was written for a keyword-searching bot, the reader will know it. Make sure you write for those real people who will be reading the post, not just for the search engine spiders.
Connect with your Readers: While it’s important to write for them by including actual content and not just sentence after sentence stuffed with keywords, you still have to engage them. If the contest interesting but written in a wholly uninteresting way, readers aren’t going to be that thrilled. If you’re worked up about the idea of writing, just decide to write like you speak. This isn’t a legal document or a literary publication submission. If your language is pompous sounding, you’ll put people off. Just write in a manner like you speak, and leave the formal language to lawyers and people from the 18th century.
Rein in Your Sales Message: If you’re using a blog to sell something, it’s okay to sell it. You can point it out to people, talk about it, hype it up a little. But you can’t do that all the time. If every post is touting the benefits of your new product, then there’s not much point in people coming back unless they’re already interesting in your product. People interested in your general subject will go elsewhere.
Don’t fill your posts with fluff and then try to sell to people on your blog. If you’re selling an e-book about 100 rainmaking techniques, offer up 3 in a blog post and then lead them to your ebook.
Keeping the readers and their needs in your mind is the key in all the best and most successful blogging strategies.
Ever wanted to change your back posts to remove the date or even better put some other text like “…some time ago…” in it’s place?.
Now you can with the date_exclusion_seo plugin. You can remove dates from the front page, the tag pages, the cat page and all, aged, or explicit posts. All have the option of creating different text in its place.
The date_exclusion_seo plugin is based on Daniel Scocco’s original version of Date Exclusion but modified to work on the latest 2.7.1 wordpress version.
Why Date Exclusion from Posts?
Most of my traffic from search engines is through old posts. This is especially true if like us you have been blogging for a long time, and have lots and lots of content. I wanted to remove the date from my old posts only, but I could not find a plugin that worked, so I modified the original plugin.
There has been plenty of discussion on the matter from various blogging sites includingDaily Blog Tips and Problogger.
This one could be a little controversial but I find that when old posts are not dated that it doesn’t create a ‘oh this is old’ type reaction in your readers.
I’ve seen this numerous times here on ProBlogger where posts written back in 2005 have attracted comments like ‘this is old’ or ‘out of date tips’ – even when the content has been of a ‘timeless’ or evergreen nature.
Personally I think that you should consider the type of blog you have before doing this. For me it works on DPS where I’ve never had dates on posts – but not here at ProBlogger where I have a topic that is more time specific (I’ll write more on this topic in coming days).
Steve Pavlina’s success is undoubtedly related to his thoughtful, timeless content. In his own words:
In terms of traffic building, timeless content connects with people at a deeper level than time-bound content. The latter is meant to be forgotten, while the former is meant to be remembered. We forget yesterday’s news, but we remember those things that have meaning to us. So I strive to write about meanings instead of happenings.
I don’t really have a concrete reason why I removed the time stamp, except that it doesn’t make the blog posts look dated. However, depending on the overall site and its content structure, dates can be important and useful.
Going without dates also affects your marketing potential. For instance, it might make it easier to promote material on social voting/bookmarking websites. For example, I can send visitors to an article I wrote 2 months ago and it’ll still appear to be fresh and new, particularly so if the content isn’t about current events/news. I also think this affects your ability to receive citation links and comments.
How to Use the Plugin
Download the plugin above and use the WordPress Plugin to install it.
Activate the Plugin
Goto Settings > Date Exclusion SEO
Modify the options below and save.
Remove Dates From Posts – removes date from all single post pages regardless
Remove Dates from Tag Pages – removes date from tag pages
Remove Dates from Category Pages – removes date from category pages
Remove Dates from Front Page – removes date from front pageNumber of Days to Expiry – number of days to expire for single post page
turn off specific posts by comma delimited list of post ids
(Optional) add alternative text to replace date functions
(Optional) Turn off each date function depending on theme
There are a variety of reasons for why WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms on the internet. Many people try different blogging platforms, but they end up coming back to WordPress because it offers so much greater functionality. Here are five of the greatest reasons for why WordPress is the best blogging platform to use regardless of whether you are brand new to blogging or have been blogging for years.
1 – The Plugin Functionality –
WordPress has a seemingly endless supply of plugins that can be downloaded, installed and utilized for absolutely free. The installation of these plugins is easy, and involves uploading the plugin to your blog space and simply activating it through the admin section in your WordPress site. Whatever you end up needing in terms of functionality, there is more than likely a number of plugins that can be downloaded and installed to improve the capability of your blog.
2 – The Theme Functionality –
Most people are going to be interested in customizing their blogs. There are literally thousands of completely unique themes out there, offering one column, two columns or three columns, graphics, color combinations and a variety of other details which allow for complete customization of your blog to suit your needs, the theme of your blog and the needs of your readers.
3 – Auto Ping Functionality –
Many scripts may offer this particular possibility, but many free blog hosts do not offer auto ping, meaning that you are going to need to ping yourself after every single post that you make. On the other hand, WordPress can do the pinging for you, which makes your life significantly easier and saves you a lot of time in the process.
4 – The Trackback –
The trackback feature is an important one if you want to know who is reading and responding to your blog, and if you want to be open about who you are reading and talking about in your blog. If you link to a post in another blog using WordPress, WordPress will automatically make a comment in the post that was linked to in order to facilitate communication between the two different blogs.
5 – The Overall Feeling of Simplicity –
WordPress is an extremely user friendly blogging platform. By using cpanel, you can install WordPress in a single click in most circumstances. After the WordPress blog is installed, you are pretty much ready to get going, provided that you do not want to do any tinkering beforehand with stats, themes and other details. You do not have to know anything at all about computers in order to set up a WordPress blog. When it is installed and ready to go, you simply have to log in to your WordPress panel, which is also extremely easy for you to use in most circumstances.
Ready to start using WordPress? I have tried lots of hosting providers and one is without a doubt the best in my mind. Exabytes Network.
You’re seeing it in action right now: my site (which has tens of thousands of readers) is run entirely on this crazy-powerful platform.
One weakness that WordPress suffers from, however, is that it is usually very slow.
Without taking the right precautions, you could end up with a sluggish site that will not only be a hassle for repeat visitors, but will most certainly lose you subscribers and customers due to the impatient nature of web browsers.
First I want to go over why your WordPress site’s speed is important to your success, and next I want to go over ALL of the best ways that I’ve found to consistently.
If you want to get right to how you can speed up your site, scroll down.
If you want to learn why you should, read below.
Why Site Speed Is Important
You’ve probably heard this before, but when a person lands on your site for the first time, you only have a few seconds to capture their attention to convince them to hang around.
If you’ve been doing this online business thing for a while, you’ll recognize the importance of branding, a nice layout, putting important things above the fold, and all of that good stuff in order to try to capture visitors into staying.
But if your page loads slowly, you may lose people before you even have the change to convert them.
Most studies have confirmed that you have a very short time to load your site before people click away, especially if they’ve been linked there from another site that they visit.
Think about that.
Someone just gave you a good reference with a link, and yet you are doing both of you a disservice by having a slow loading site that nobody would want to wait around for.
Not only that, you are stunting your own growth by losing these potential subscribers, especially early on.
You have on average a single digit time frame before you lose somebody to a slow loading page.
That means if your site takes longer than 10 seconds to load, most people are gone, lost before you even had the change to convince them to stick around and give your blog or website a change.
Not only that, but Google has now included site speed in it’s ranking algorithm. That means that your site’s speed effects it’s SEO, so if your site is slow, you are not only losing visitors out of impatience, but you are also losing them by having reduced rankings in search engines.
So let’s see how we can fix that.
How To Speed Up WordPress
As a side note, these are not ordered by importance or any criteria, I’ve just gathered everything I’ve learned about speeding up page loads on WordPress and compiled them here.
I guarantee that using even a few of these will drastically speed up your site.
1. Choose a good host
While starting out, a shared host might seem like a bargain (“Unlimited page views, wowie zowie!”), it comes at another price: incredibly slow site speed and frequent down time during high traffic periods.
If you plan on doing awesome stuff (aka the kind of stuff that creates high traffic periods), you’re killing yourself by running your WordPress site on shared hosting.
The stress of your site going down after getting a big feature is enough to create a few early gray hairs: don’t be a victim, invest in proper hosting.
The only WordPress host I continually recommend is below… (drum roll please…)
My sites are always blazingly fast, never have downtime when I get huge features (like when I was featured on the Discovery Channel blog!), and the backend is stupidly simple.
Last but not least, support is top notch, which is a must when it comes to hosting… take it from a guy who’s learned that the hard way!
Head on over to the WP Engine homepage and check out their offerings, you’ll be happy you did.
2. Start with a solid framework/theme
You might be surprised to here this, but the Twenty Ten/Twenty Eleven “framework” (aka the default WP themes) are quite speedy frameworks to use.
That’s because they keep it the “guts” simple, and light frameworks are always the way to go to have a speedy site.
From my experience, the fastest loading premium framework is definitely the Thesis Theme Framework(aff).
Whatever you might say about it’s SEO abilities (I prefer to use plugins and my own edits), it is definitely a solid framework for quick page loads, I’ve always had this experience as have many others.
3. Use an effective caching plugin
WordPress plugins are obviously quite useful, but some of the best fall under the caching category, as they drastically improve page loads time, and best of all, all of them on WP.org are free and easy to use.
By far my favorite, bar none, is W3 Total Cache, I wouldn’t recommend or use any other caching plugin, it has all of the features you need and is extremely easy to install and use.
Simply install and activate, and what your page load faster as elements are cached.
4. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
All of your favorite big blogs are making use of this, and if you are into online marketing using WordPress (as I’m sure many of my readers are) you won’t be surprised to here that some of your favorite blogs like Copyblogger are making use of CDN’s.
Essentially, a CDN, or content delivery network, takes all your static files you’ve got on your site (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.
I personally use the Max CDN Content Delivery Network on my WordPress sites, as I’ve found that they have the most reasonable prices and their dashboard is very simple to use (and comes with video tutorials for setting it up, takes only a few minutes).
There is a plugin called Free-CDN that promises to do the same, although I haven’t tested it.
5. Optimize images (automatically)
Yahoo! has an image optimizer called Smush.it that will drastically reduce the file size of an image, while not reducing quality.
However, if you are like me, doing this to every image would be beyond a pain, and incredibly time consuming.
Fortunately, there is an amazing, free plugin called WP-SmushIt which will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them. No reason not to install this one.
6. Optimize your homepage to load quickly
This isn’t one thing but really a few easy things that you can do to ensure that your homepage loads quickly, which probably is the most important part of your site because people will be landing there the most often.
Things that you can do include:
Show excerpts instead of full posts
Reduce the number of posts on the page (I like showing between 5-7)
Remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page (include them only in posts)
Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need
Keep in minimal! Readers are here for content, not 8,000 widgets on the homepage
Overall, a clean and focused homepage design will help your page not only look good, but load quicker as well.
7. Optimize your WordPress database
I’m certainly getting a lot of use out of the word “optimize” in this post!
This can be done the very tedious, extremly boring manual fashion, or…
You can simply use the WP-Optimize plugin, which I run on all of my sites.
This plugin lets you do just one simple task: optimize the your database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.) to reduce their overhead.
I would also recommend the WP-DB Manager plugin, which can schedule dates for database optimization.
8. Disable hotlinking and leeching of your content
Hotlinking is a form of bandwidth “theft.” It occurs when other sites direct link to the images on your site from their articles making your server load increasingly high.
This can add up as more and more people “scrape” your posts or your site (and especially images) become more popular, as must do if you create custom images for your site on a regular basis.
Place this code in your root .htaccess file:
disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
You’ll notice I included my feed (from FeedBurner), you’ll need to replace it with your feed’s name, otherwise your images won’t appear correctly there.
9. Add an expires header to static resources
An Expires header is a way to specify a time far enough in the future so that the clients (browsers) don’t have to re-fetch any static content (such as css file, javascript, images etc).
This way can cut your load time significantly for your regular users.
You need to copy and paste the following code in your root .htaccess file:
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
The above numbers are set for a month (in seconds), you can change them as you wish.
10. Adjust Gravatar images
You’ll notice on this site that the default Gravatar image is set to… well, nothing.
This is not an aesthetic choice, I did it because it improves page loads by simply having nothing where there would normally be a goofy looking Gravatar logo or some other nonsense.
Some blogs go as far to disable them throughout the site, and for everyone.
You can do either, just know that it will at least benefit your site speed if you set the default image (found in “Discussion”, under the settings dab in the WordPress dashboard) to a blank space rather than a default image.
11. Add LazyLoad to your images
LazyLoad is the process of having only only the images above the fold load (i.e. only the images visible in the visitor’s browser window), then, when reader scrolls down, the other images begin to load, just before they come into view.
This will not only speed you page loads, it can also save bandwidth by loading less data for users who don’t scroll all the way down on your pages.
WordPress, left to its own devices, would store every single one of these drafts, indefinitely.
Now, when this post is done and published, why would I need all of those drafts stored?
That’s why I use the Revision Control plugin to make sure I keep post revisions to a minimum, set it to 2 or 3 so you have something to fall back on in case you make a mistake, but not too high that you clutter your backend with unnecessary amounts of drafted posts.
13. Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks
By default, WordPress interacts with other blogs that are equipped with pingbacks and trackbacks.
Every time another blog mentions you, it notifies your site, which in turn updates data on the post. Turning this off will not destroy the backlinks to your site, just the setting that generates a lot of work for your site.
This one is a little bit advanced, but can drastically cut down your load time if you are desperate to include page load speeds, so I included it.
I’d be doing this great post injustice if I didn’t link to it for this topic, as it taught me how to easily do this myself, in a few minutes.
So go there and check it out, it wrote it out in plainer terms than I ever could!
15. Use CloudFlare
This is similar to the section above on using CDN’s, but I’ve become so fond of CloudFlare since I discussed it in my best web analyticspost that I’ve decided to include it separately here.
To put it bluntly, CloudFlare, along with the W3 Total Cache plugin discussed above, are a really potent combination (they integrate with each other) that will greatly improve not only the speed, but the security of your site.
And, both are free, so you have no excuse!
Thanks for reading, please share this article if you enjoyed it.
