If you are a blogger and you want to get your site online and operational, you should seek to develop a platform where the content is easy to read and the functionality is user-friendly for the site’s visitors. Whether you are a first-time blogger, or you are looking at ways to improve your blog, you can check out these tips below.
Site speed
One of the critical elements is the website’s speed. It is important to maximize the speed at which the site will deliver the content in order to minimize the bounce rate and to enhance the user experience on the website. There are a number of ways to improve the speed of your website. These include:
Partnering with a reliable web host provider
This is a critical element when developing your website. You need to ensure that the web content that is stored on the server will be served to the user quickly. You can invest in different web hosting solutions that can improve the speed of your website. Shared hosting solutions pose the highest risk with having a slow performing site. This is because your site can be impacted by the traffic going to the server from other websites. An ideal solution would be to opt for a dedicated server or a virtual private server. This way, you will confidently know that your website won’t be impacted by traffic spikes from other sites that are sharing the same server and that your site should have sufficient bandwidth should your site experience additional traffic.
Additionally, it is common for websites to encounter traffic spikes. Some traffic spikes may cause the website to slow down and not serve the content simply because there isn’t enough bandwidth for the web traffic that is going to the site. Web hosting experts Host Geek’s guide on ‘How to deal with traffic spikes’ explains the importance of managing these spikes in terms of user experience and its impact on a website’s SEO performance.
Partnering with a reliable DNS provider
You want to make sure that when people type in the domain name of your website that the content will be served promptly. If you have a quick website, but a slow DNS (domain name server) provider, then you will still experience people bouncing off your site before they have even had a chance to view the content. Check online reviews and recommendations before partnering with a DNS provider. You need to ensure that the DNS provider that you partner with will always be online and has a good reputation with the uptime of their domain servers.
Manage the plugins within your CMS platform
Depending on what CMS platform you are using (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.), there could be a number of plugins that are contributing to your website’s slow performance. Dev Sharma posted on Search Engine Journal a guide detailing plugins to use on WordPress to reduce the web loading time. If your site has installed plugins, which are inactive, it may be worth uninstalling them as they could also be contributing to your website’s slow performance.
Utilising a content delivery network
You can use a service such as Amazon S3 (Amazon simple storage) which will cache elements of the web pages on your site so that the page will load faster for the user by relying less on the loading requirements from the site and database itself and more on the cached data that will be loaded into the web browser.
Installing a good theme
This is one of the challenging considerations for most bloggers. There are hundreds of thousands of themes (free and paid) to choose from. The choice to install a theme that will impress aesthetically and that will deliver a performance that will keep your audience engaged. The Genesis Framework by StudioPress is a popular option. They offer paid for themes, which come with ongoing development support. Alternatively, you can review the available themes on ThemeForest.
Security
The other major consideration is to invest in a theme and in web hosting solutions that will maintain a high level of security for your site. There are constant threats such as malware and hacking that could damage your website. Check the security options and support that come with website themes and the web hosting solution that you will be opting for.
You want to make your blog impress your audience. Focus on developing your blog to deliver content in a user-friendly way that is engaging and that won’t affect their security. Build a good foundation and you will be sure to build a successful blog.
