7 Quick Tips To Improve Your Blog

Sometimes it’s the little things that people will never see or that are barely noticeable that will help your blog stand out to readers. A few tweaks here and there can greatly improve the experience people have when they visit your blog so it is always important to try to improve your blog regularly. It’s not always the design that helps improve the experience! So, here are 7 easy & quick tips that will help improve your blog so your readers enjoy visiting more often!

email sign up

There are many ways to follow a blog but subscribing via email is still a very popular method for some people. Always make sure there is an easy-to-find sign-up. I have 3 different options on my blog. There is a sign-up form in my sidebar, a sign-up bar at the very top of my blog, and I include a sign-up form at the end of every post. Almost all of my email subscriptions come from just two of those: the sign-up bar and the form within my posts.

Having a clear way to sign up via email is important. If you have a visitor who is searching for a sign-up & can’t find one, they’ll likely leave (if that is their preferred method).

Bloglovin’ follow option

This one is a little selfish, but still – please, please, please, if you can, add a way to follow your blog via Bloglovin’. This is now exclusively the way I follow blogs and I’m pretty sure many other people use this as their exclusive method as well. Sometimes, if a blog does not have a button on their homepage to follow, you can copy & paste the link into Bloglovin’ to follow it yourself. However, I have come across a few blogs that are not synced properly. Meaning their posts do not show up correctly.

It’s really easy to do this:

1. Search your blog via the search bar on Bloglovin’
» If it is not there, make sure your RSS feed is valid using this validator
 » Don’t know where your feed is? You can either use Feedburner to set one up or use www.yoururl.com/feed/

2. Claim your blog
» Sign up for Bloglovin’
» Find your blog’s Bloglovin’ page
» Click “Claim it”
» Copy & Paste the provided code into a new blog post in the HTML or to a recent posts HTML

3. Add any widget or button to your site for your readers to follow.
» I use a custom icon with a link to follow

Done! See? Easy-peasy.

social media share buttons

Always offer a way to share your posts via social media. Sometimes people like to share your post with their followers via Twitter or Facebook, this community is awesome like that. Make sure it’s easy for people to do so! You don’t have to offer every social media share option, but at least offer the main ones like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest.

compress YOUR IMAGES

I’ve talked about this one several times like in Make Your Media Library Your Bitch . If you upload a photo to your site without compressing it, it will most likely be a huge file size. That size will bog down your website the more images you upload (that are not compressed) because your site has to work extra hard to load it all. Compressing them will improve your site load time, it’s win-win.

You can either compress them before uploading using sites like TinyPNG (max of 5MB), Compress PNG or Compress JPEG. Or, you can be lazy like me, and use a service that can do it in bulk like ShortPixel. For example, before writing this post I compressed the recent uploads I had and this was the result:

That’s a decent amount optimized from just a few images!

More Site Speed Tips

1. Limit the # of posts on your home page – Whether you use a grid view, a summary list (like mine), or have full posts, limit the number you have on the homepage. The more you have visible, the more your site has to load, the longer it takes, and the more likely it is the visitor will grow tired of waiting for load times.

2. Deactivate/delete inactive plugins – If you have plugins that you don’t use at all times, deactivate/delete them. For example, I don’t always use Shortpixel so I don’t have to have it activated 24/7. They’re just another thing your site will have to load in the background and it’s all about making your site fast for the visitors.

HAVE popular posts & recommended posts

1. In your sidebar, have a list or grid view of your popular posts, not your most recent. Visitors can already see your most recent when scrolling through the list on the homepage. Instead use popular because those will not always be the same as the most recent – which means more traffic to older posts.

2. At the end of each blog post either manually add links to related posts or have something that automatically generates related posts. It’s just another way for visitors to continue reading your content.

---

I hope these prove helpful for you!

Do you have any tips you can add to this?

Do you already do some of these? Or will you start?