Take the clutter off your site design and get a fresh rush of traffic

One of the things that gathers moss as we go along is the site design. And it’s even worse with blogs. Wordpress unfortunately has got lot of plugins and frills available for free, that we all keep on adding them until one day we find that it’s all biting back on the blog.

For instance, all the styling and the plugins we add, do you have any idea how much extra junk is added to the code? You might want to check today. Code ratio, Page size, and a lot of stuff get affected, and the funny thing is that you never notice it but is under the impression that they are all doing good for your blog. Let’s de clutter the blog with all those unwanted fancy stuff and allow that fresh rush

1. Plugins and widgets
   How many new plugins have you added recently? It’s great if you can keep track of all the plugins you installed and uninstalled by keeping a document log about it because, not only does it help you to keep track of things but also help you to find out what went wrong. Sometimes, when you come across unexpected errors, most of the times it’s due to a new plugin you installed or it’s non-compatibility with another one. If you have non-running plugins at this time, go ahead and delete the plugin file from the directory.
   Or if you have been running a stupid plugin that you don’t use, remove it and you’ll save quite a lot on the code size.
2. Check for duplicate meta tags
   Although meta tags are not really important in getting ranks on the SERPs, they are still important in attracting visitors to your site. Check your “site:www.yoursite.com” search on Google, and you can see the title tags and meta description for all the pages indexed.
   There are instances like using two plugins UTW and HeadSpace or UTW and All in One SEO, which results in duplicate meta tags and description. See which plugin is causing the duplicate content and delete it or change the settings accordingly.
3. Check your page size
   Use this tool and check your page size. Make sure you have an optimum page size so that it doesn’t take ages to load your page on a slower internet connection. Most of the times, there would be additional codes added to your pages by various plugins and widget scripts. Use the tool to find out how much time it takes to load your page and is it under acceptable level or not.
4. Check your theme on various browsers
   Whenever I talk about cross browser compatibility issues, there’d be someone who says that we’ve done it all. And I ask them how far they’ve done it only to know that they’ve tested the theme on Firefox, IE. Opera and may be Safari. That’s the end. Well, that’s not what we are talking about here. your blog is viewed by numerous type of people on the internet and you got to check if they are all able to see the website/blog the same way or not. For this you have to check the blog/site on various browsers/ resolutions and with and without elements such as Javascript, flash etc. Also there is an array of web browsers available and things doesn’t end with FF and Opera.
   Fortunately there is a nice tool available that will help you check our blog on various browsers and give you screenshots of it. So you can see yourself if there are any problems with it. Here is the tool.
5. See if you have any broken links on your site
   Go to Google webmaster Tools and find out if there are any broken links from your site. They don’t do any harm but it’s always good to keep them away. Either use a spider crawler to emulate the crawling and find out the broken links, otherwise use Google webmasters to find it. The less broken links the better.
6. Optimize your images
   No I’m talking about ALT tags LOL. Check as to how many images load on your homepage ans see how much time they take. You can use the same tool I mentioned in the first point. If they take too long to load, optimize them by converting to gifs or smaller Jpeg versions.

Okay, let’s continue with this tomorrow, meanwhile, do your initial checks first.

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