If you are looking for the best ways to improve your WordPress-powered blog, you have come to the right article! In this piece, we would like to share some of the best tips for improving your site in a flash. A few small changes can go a long way, all while making a lasting impact.
1. Speed Up Your Blog
The Speed must always be the utmost priority when improving your site. You need to constantly check your site’s speed statistics to ensure that your blog is running at peak performance to improve both SEO and user experience. If you want to have an in-depth analysis of your pages, we suggest using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool!
There are quite a lot of factors that can affect a blog’s speed. However, in general, these three things are the major factors that play a big role in your site’s speed:
Web Hosting
The quality of the web hosting you use is arguably the most significant aspect that will affect your blog’s speed. Good hosting will make sure your WordPress blog’s performance isn’t bottlenecked by something out of your control.
That being said, the number of resources you get from a web hosting plan is also important. If you use shared hosting that offers minimal resources, do not expect your blog to run as fast as your competitors that use Cloud Hosting that has more resources. This will have a major impact on high-traffic period performance too!
It’s essential to get to know the services powering your WordPress blog. We suggest taking the time to read more about the topic, so you can make an informed decision about what works best for you.
Visual Content
Visual content like images and videos are fun to add, but they also take longer to load, which means that they will greatly affect your blog’s speed.
However, erasing all visual content from your blog is not a wise decision since it is a great way to attract and retain visitors.
The key is to find balance. You can try limiting how many images you add to posts or use compressed images to reduce file sizes and loading time. You can also use a WordPress plugin like Lazy Load for Videos to have content load only when it’s required by visitors.
Widgets and Plugins
Since WordPress provides thousands of widgets and plugins that can extend your site’s functions, you might try to get as much use out of them as possible. Unfortunately, using a lot of WordPress plugins at once will slow your blog down.
Only use the plugins and widgets that you really need. For instance, if you run a cooking blog, you can use either the WP Recipe Maker or WP Ultimate Recipe to enrich your content. Research the plugins, and decide which one will work better, instead of just adding both.
2. Create SEO-Friendly Content
Good SEO is one of the essential cornerstones of every successful blog. It does require a lot of practice and keeping up with the best practices, but the result will be very rewarding and beneficial in the long term.
By creating SEO-friendly content, your blog will rank higher on the SERP (search engine result pages). Thus, increasing the number of blog visitors.
If you are used to creating content without practicing basic SEO principles, try adding them to your workflow. This will improve your blog’s reach significantly. Here are some things you can do:
Using Keywords that are Suitable to Your Niche
Correct use of keywords is at the core of SEO-friendly articles. If you intend to improve your content’s SEO, the first thing you must do is add the right keywords in the right places.
There are hundreds of online sources that can teach you everything you need to know. We recommend starting with keyword research.
There are little things you can start doing right away! Try putting the main keyword in the first paragraph of your article. Make it as natural as possible and do not force it where it does not belong. Keyword stuffing is a bad practice that your visitors will be annoyed by and Google’s algorithms won’t appreciate either. An SEO-friendly article should not have a higher keyword density than 2%-2,5%.
Using Headings and Subheadings
Separating your article into several headings and subheadings will make your content easier to skim for both readers and search engine crawlers. In other words, it will improve your chances to rank higher on the search engine result pages.
In addition, separating your writing into headings allows for better keyword distribution.
Use headings in an orderly fashion, start with heading 1 for the title, and nest with heading 2, 3, etc. Eventually, you’ll find your own way of structuring content pieces that fits your readers and improves SEO.