All Posts Tagged With: "17"

This is the fifth of a series of posts designed to discuss ways to monitor and improve your blog’s performance.

In addition to the website maintenance tips covered in the first four posts of this series, there are a few other things that can be done to help keep your site running smoothly. Here are a few other things I try to keep up on:

• Update your WordPress Plugins - This obviously only applies to WordPress users, but that is who this series of posts is targeted for. Keeping your plugins up to date will help you to avoid security vulnerabilities, as well as help avoid problems when you upgrade to newer versions of WordPress. I try to do this monthly, but you should at a minimum do this everytime you upgrade to the next major version of WordPress (such as 2.2 or 2.3, etc.).
• Get rid of things you don’t use - This is kind of broad, but in addition to removing code that isn’t being used, it can be beneficial to also remove old files that you aren’t using. This can include images that came with your theme that you have since removed, things you’ve uploaded to try out and didn’t stick with, or extra pages of code that aren’t being used. This probably won’t effect your site’s load time or anything like that, but it will help keep things more organized and running smoothly.
• Check for bad links - Part of keeping your blog optimized for search engines is controlling your internal and outbound links. If you’ve changed your permalink structure, linked out to bad sites (pornography, gambling, etc.), or done outbound links to pages that have since been removed, this can have a negative effect on your search engine rankings. An easy way to find out what links are no longer valid is to go to Dead Links and have it spider your site. You can then go through and remove these links, or update them accordingly.
• Use your Google Webmaster Tools - You should regularly check your Google Webmaster Tools to ensure that everything is set up the way you want. You can control how Google displays your site, validate your Robots.txt file, or submit your blog’s sitemap. Google will actually provide you all sorts of information about what their spider found when visiting your site, including HTTP errors, 404 errors, unreachable URL’s, and URL’s blocked by Robots.txt. This way you can remove old posts that are now unreachable for whatever reason, as well as verify your Robots.txt is blocking what you want it to and not additional stuff. You can also run a spider simulator if you want an idea of what your site looks like to the search engines.
• Remove old scripts - Scripts often slow down your computer’s load time, so if you don’t use all those analytics services that you have scripts running for, you should probably remove them.

Anything else you do regularly to keep your website maintained?

This is the third of a series of posts designed to discuss ways to monitor and improve your blog’s performance.

Now that you’ve got your website code validated, another good practice to be in is to keep your stylesheet (CSS) as clean and optimal as possible. I try to do this at least once a month, as I am regularly making changes to my site and my stylesheet tends to be filled with a bunch of styles that aren’t being used for anything. This can help improve the navigation of your stylesheet and keep your file size down, which will help lower the site’s load time on occasions when the web browser grabs your stylesheet.

The tool I use to keep my stylesheet clean is called Clean CSS. You can add your stylesheet’s URL, browse your computer’s harddrive for a copy of your stylesheet, or copy and paste your stylesheet on to their website and click Optimize CSS. Clean CSS will then dig through your code and clean it up for you. In order to clean it up, Clean CSS will remove code that isn’t doing anything, as well as make adjustments to how the code is written to shrink the file size of your stylesheet. An example would be them changing:

padding: 5px 8px 5px 8px to padding: 5px 8px

It will also shrink some of your hexadecimal color codes whenever possible.

Once it outputs your new stylesheet, Clean CSS will provide you your optimized code to paste it over your existing stylesheet. If you don’t like Clean CSS, you can also check out some other alternatives such as the CSS Optimizer.

Another thing I do to improve the navigation of my stylesheet is to break it down into categories. You can add titles that won’t count as code by using certain characters that look like this:

/*- Post Meta Section */

Any other tricks you do to keep a neat stylesheet? Sound off in the comments below!

This is the first of a series of posts designed to discuss ways to monitor and improve your blog’s performance. 

If you run a lower traffic blog and are looking to increase your readership, there are several things you can do to help people find your blog.   The problem is, once they’ve found your website, it can sometimes be difficult to retain them as a reader.  This is especially true if most of your traffic comes from search engines or sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

Whether you believe it or not, website performance actually plays a big part in keeping that unique visitor’s attention long enough to read your content.   If your website takes to long to load, it is unlikely that your potential reader will even stay long enough to see the full page load.

Luckily, there are several free tools to help you monitor your blog’s load time and figure out what is slowing it down.  The site I use primarily is called OctaGate SiteTimer.  Simply enter your blog’s URL, click Start, and it will do a quick check and display the results.  This whole process can be completed in 15-20 seconds!

Other sites that accomplish the same or similar goals are:

• Free Website Speed Tester
• Web Page Speed Report
• Web Page Load Timer

This should give you a good idea of what hangups are taking place when your website is loading.  Your goal should be to have your website load in under 7 seconds.   If it is taking longer, give some consideration to removing the culprits, which will usually be extra widgets appearing somewhere on your blog (MyBlogLog widget, Alexa widget, BlogCatalog widget, Good Blogs, Blogrush, etc.).   Also, some advertising services may add to your page load time if they are a smaller service with servers that have trouble handling the load.