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Category: Wordpress

I have never and will NEVER offer paid courses or coaching. I show you how I do things, give you the tools to do it yourself and recommend services. Wordpress is the most important environment I use to build my business.
Wordpress

Using Google Analytics for your blog – Traffic Sources

This is part 2 of a series I’m writing called Using Google Analytics for your blog.   If you missed the first part, which discussed what Google Analytics is and went over the Google Analytics Audience Overview section,  please head over and give it a read.   This article will dive into the next section, Google Analytics – Traffic Sources where we’re learn how to find out who is sending you traffic.

Remember, this series will touch on the basic information from each section of Google Analytics.  The article is not intended as a deep dive into all of the underlying detail that Analytics provides.  As I stated in first part of this series, doing a full deep dive would take a large eBook.  This article and the others in the series will focus more on basic information you’ll use on a frequent basis.

Google Analytics Part 2

Traffic Sources

The next section in your left hand menu (after Audience Overview) is Traffic Sources.  Clicking on Traffic Sources will, by default, show the Overview sub-section.  Your screen should look similar to this:

Google Analytics Traffic Sources

Click for larger image

The traffic sources overview page provides you with an overview of the sources of your traffic.  I know, you’re thinking – Well gee thanks Captain Obvious…let me explain…

Day to day, visitors arrive on your website.  Some of them go straight to your blog using your URL or domain name.  Most of them more likely come from other sites  such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, social media, and blogs that link to you.  The Traffic Sources overview page will show you where these visitors come from.  Let’s look at the data provided on the main screen first, then we’ll dive into some of the other sections that you’ll find useful.

The graph at the top of the page is the same as the graph in the Audience Overview.  By default it shows your Visits.  You can also adjust the graph to view other information.   I seldom ever change this.  You can also adjust the date range in the upper right corner.  By default the last 30 days are shown.

Below the graph is a summary of how many people visited your site along with a pie chart showing the breakdown of traffic sources by search traffic, referral traffic, direct traffic and campaigns.

Search Traffic – Shows the percentage of your traffic that arrived from search engines.  Just below the percentage is the actual count.  From my screenshot, my search traffic accounted for about 52% of my overall traffic.  There really isn’t any “good” or “bad” number here.  Good and bad are relevant based on how you are targeting your traffic.  Generally though, you want this number to be fairly high, and greater than 50%.  Why?  Search engine visitors are the visitors that generally click on ads.  If you’re trying to earn income, especially using Adsense, search engine visitors are the primary type of traffic you want.

Referral Traffic – This is traffic coming from other sites outside of search engines.  This traffic is the result of people clicking on links and arriving at your site.  I’ll show you how to figure out exactly which sites below.  This would also be where your email list traffic would be included.

Direct Traffic – This traffic comes from people directly navigating to your website, either from a bookmark in their browser or by typing your blog’s URL directly into their browser.

To the right of the summary data is a list of keywords that people used in search engines to arrive at your site.  If you’re like me, a large percentage will fall up under “not provided”.  You can read about why your keywords are hidden in David Kutcher’s article A “not proivided’ tip from your analytics.

In the screenshot, I hid my keywords – I apologize for that.  Unfortunately this is the internet, and you can’t trust everyone.  I know most of you are honest and straight up, but I’ve just worked too hard to rank well for some of these, and don’t want to risk someone trying to out rank me.  Hope you understand.

The summary information is good of course, but there really isn’t a whole you can do with it.  The good stuff is down in the details a bit.

Traffic Sources>>Sources

Under the Traffic Sources menu is another menu named Sources.  Click to open it, and then click on All Traffic.

All Traffic will show you, in order of Visits, who your top traffic sources were from for the time period selected.   I use this frequently to see if any large sites have linked to me, to see how many click throughs I’m getting from guest posts I’ve done, and also to see which social media platforms are doing well for me, and which ones are not.  This is one of the Google Analytics screens I check at least once daily.

Here’s a screenshot of my Sources page:

Google Analytics Sources

Click for larger image

The Pages/Visit metric I discussed in the first article in this series was for your whole site.  On this page though, we’re seeing these numbers broken out by referrer.  This allows you to see how “sticky” traffic is from each of the referrers listed.  For example, looking at mine, I see the pages/view for Google+ and other blogs that refer to me have higher numbers, where searches from Google have lower numbers.  Google users are typically looking for an answer, they get it and move on.  Where links from guest post articles often involve people browsing my site and spending more time.  If you’ll note, the bounce rates reflect the same.

Also interesting is Pinterest.  I received a really nice burst of traffic from PInterest, primary from my How to Build up Your Blog article, but the bounce rate is high.  I’m going to give myself a little homework assignment to research if that’s common, and if not look at some additional changes I can make to make Pinterest visitors a little more sticky.  I’ve already taken one shot at this, but obviously need to improve a little more.

Sources>>Direct

The direct sub-menu will show you the pages people visited directly.  Generally this is because people have bookmarked your content.  These articles are typically “evergreen” content articles, and frequently some of your “best stuff”.  Which is why people bookmarked it.  For earning money, these are articles that you would typically want to tweak to either include ads or affiliate offers where applicable.

I don’t typically use the Search page or Referrals page much as the information I need is on the overview page.

Traffic Sources >> Search Engine Optimization

This page will provide you with more detailed information about the queries users are putting into Google.  Clicking on the Queries menu will show you a list of keyword queries people are using to arrive at your site.  While this is interesting information, I personally seldom use it.  I prefer to use Google’s Webmaster tools as they provide you with much better and more comprehensive information.

The Landing Pages menu shows you the pages from your site that visitors arrive on most frequently when coming from search engines.   I use this page to determine which of my blog posts I need to focus on making “sticky”.

The strategy here is to use this data to determine which pages visitors land on, then update and edit those pages so that visitors have lots of more content options to click on.  You can give them more options by editing your article text to include additional links, adding “Other pages you might like” options and adding widgets to the sidebar to feature more content.

The Geographical Summary menu will show you what countries your search traffic is coming from.  Good information, but again not something I’ve found a need for just yet.

Traffic Sources >> Social Media

The Social Media Overview section provides you access to metrics on your social media traffic.  Here’s a screen shot from my Analytics:

Google Analytics Social Media

Click for larger image

The graph is really more focused on conversions – meaning social traffic that lead to people making purchases or clicking ads on your site.  Conversations are calculated using Google Analytics goals.  I won’t go into the details of goals, but at a high level goals allow you to keep track of when people visit certain pages on your site.  I have goals set-up, which is why I’m showing some conversations, but not dollar amounts.

The main data that you’ll be interested in on this page is in the lower right hand side.  This will show you the number of visits you received from social media, and the percentage of overall site visits that social media accounted for.  As you can see here on Side Income Blogging, over the past 30 days, Pinterest was first, Google+ second, and Facebook a far third.

The other menu items below Social allow you to drive into further detail about traffic from your social media visits:

Network Referrals

Similar to earlier pages we looked at, this page shows you more detail about your social media visits.  The graph shows you a comparison of your social media traffic to your overall traffic.  The table below shows you detail on Visits, Pageviews, how long the visitor was on your site and how many pages they viewed per visit.   This is actually a pretty interesting section as it gives you some good data on how sticky your social media traffic is by social media site.  You can use this data to determine where and how to spend your social media efforts.

Landing Pages

The Landing Pages section shows you what pages visitors from social media arrived on, again with information on pages/visit and duration.  You can use this page to determine which of your pages was most popular on social media.  Knowing which pages did well, allows you to create similar or complementary content that should also do well on social media.

Conversions

I mentioned conversions above, and primarily this section is intended to capture monetary earnings from conversions resulting from social media traffic.  I personally don’t use this section currently.

Plugins

This page is used to track specific actions that occur and are specific to social media.  For example, on Google+ it would be +1s, on Facebook Likes, etc.  By default, Google Analytics will track your Google+ activity automatically.  For other social media sites, you’ll have to make some changes to your default Analytics scripts.  I personally don’t track this level of data but if you’re interested, you can read up on how to add additional social media plugins on the analytics help page.

Visitor Flow

This is another page I personally don’t use much, but definitely has a high cool factor 🙂  On this page, you can see, by social media site, the path that your visitors navigate through on your site.  The flow graph even shows how many people went from page to page so you can see how many dropped off your site, and how many didn’t.  Like I said, really cool, but not something I’ve found highly useful just yet.

Wrapping Up

That wraps up the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics.  As you’re probably beginning to see, Google Analytics tracks an enormous amount of data and most of it you probably won’t use frequently, at least if you’re like me.

Next in the series we’ll discuss the Content section, then I’ll wrap up this series with some very specific tips and strategies for how to pull out some valuable information about your site from Google Analytics.

Analytics is a really powerful tool for improving your site, and I hope you’re finding this overview information helpful!

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Jon February 12, 2013 2 Comments
Wordpress

Using Google Analytics for your blog – Audience Overview

One of the key tools you should have set-up on your blog from day one is Google Analytics.

Setting up Analytics is pretty simple, but understanding how to use it and all of the data it provides isn’t.  I often receive questions like:  How do I use Google Analytics? and I have analytics set-up, but have no idea what I’m looking at.  Can you help me understand Google Analytics?.

With those questions in mind, I thought I would put together a series that will overview what Google Analytics is, how Google Analytics works, overview each of he main Gooogle Analytics sections and discuss how you can use Google Analytics to build up your blog.  This is the first of a series of articles that will address all of these topics, in detail for you.

If you don’t currently have Google Analytics set-up and running, go ahead and add Google Analytics to your blog.  No time like the present and by putting this off, you’re just missing out on collecting valuable data that will help improve your blog and understand your visitors usage patterns.

Using Google Analytics for your blog

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web-based product provided by Google that allows you to view information about the traffic reaching your blog.  Not only can you view information about your blog’s traffic, you can dive into great detail about it as well.

Some of this detail can include things like: what type of browser your visitors are using, the type of computer, visitor language, originating country, mobile or non-mobile, flow diagrams showing he path visitors take when they visit you site…and well, the list just keeps going.  I’ve been using Analytics on my sites since it first came out, and I still find new data and features all the time.  Analytics is a pretty amazing piece of software.

The best part about Google Analytics?  Analytics is the defacto-standard for tracking website visitor information and it’s FREE – yes, zero cost and with no catch.  There is simply no valid reason you shouldn’t be using it.

How does Google Analytics Work?

Google Analytics works through a tracking script that you install on your blog.  This script should be included in each of your blog pages and sends Google Analytics data about the visitors to your site to Google’s servers, where it is recorded.

This script is installed to your blog, below the footer and just before the </body> tag.  If you’re running Thesis, you can easily add the script by pasting it into the Stat and Tracking scripts textbox located in your WordPress admin console, under Thesis>>Site Options.

Basic Analytics Information for your blog

This article series will guide you through the main areas of Analytics that most people use on a daily/weekly basis.  Covering all of the various views and reports provided by Analytics would be far beyond the scope of this series, and would  be enough for a large sized eBook.

Assuming you’ve got Google Analytics set-up and running on your blog, here’s how to access your Analytics data:

  1. Navigate to Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/).
  2. Click on sign-in located in the top right corner.  If you’re already signed in using your Google account, you’ll be sent right to Analytics.  If not, you’ll need to enter your Google credentials.
  3. From the Accounts home page, select your website name, then select it again.  I’m not sure why Analytics does this – Anyone know?

Note: If you just set-up Analytics, you won’t have any data to to view yet.  Just give it a day or two and then come back.

You should see a screen that looks something like this:

Google Analytics Main Page

Click for a larger image

Audience Overview

This is the main page of Google Analytics and the default page you will always come to when you open Analytics for your blog.  The Audience overview page provides you with a summary of your blog’s basic traffic.

The first thing you should note is the timeframe, located in the top righthand corner. The default is the past 30 days, and does not include  today. You can view today’s data, but you have to specifically include it in the date range. You can adjust this range to be whatever range you want. Generally I use the last 30 days, but it depends on what I’m looking for and will sometimes go back 90 days if looking at search traffic trends.

The next and most important item on this page is the graph, which by default shows you visits to your blog for the last month. By default, each data point is a day (so visits for one day). You can change this by selecting a different value in the top right corner of the graph that shows: Hourly | Day | Week | Month. Generally you won’t change this, but if you want to see your traffic for a longer period of time, using the Month view is often better.

Again, the graph shows visits.

Visits (per Google) = A visit is a group of interactions that take place on your website within a given time frame.

Here’s an example: I visit Side Income Blogging and land on the main page. I see an article I like, navigate to it and read it. At the bottom, I see a few relevant posts and click on one of them, read it as well and leave. That would count as one visit.

You can also adjust this chart to show page views, by clicking on the drop down in the top left of the chart and selecting PageViews.

PageViews (per Google) = Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.

In the example I used above, while the visit count would be 1, the pageview count would be: 3.

In general, you want to see your visit graph trending upwards over the long term. Mine, from the screenshot is only for 30 days, but is a little flatter than I would like to see it.  I need to work on that, but it’s a good example of the type of valuable information Google Analytics provides.

Let’s look a little lower at the numbers and pie chart:

Google Analytics Details

Click for a larger image

The section on the left show’s summary data about your site for the time period selected.

  • Visits = The total number of visits over the past 30 days (or for the time period you have selected).
  • Unique Visitors = The total number of unique visits over the past 30 days.  As an example, if I visit Side Income Blogging multiple times in a 30 day period, my visits are only counted once in this metric; however, under Visits, they would be counted however many times I visited.
  • Pageviews = The total number of pageviews for the past 30 days
  • Pages/Visit = The average number of pages each visitor viewed during a single visit
  • Average Visit Duration = How long, on average, people that visited stayed on your site.
  • Bounce Rate = Percentage of single page visits.  In other words, this is the percentage of people that arrive on your site, view a page, then leave.
  • Percentage of New Visits = An estimate of the percentage of visitors coming to your site for the first time (also shown in the pie chart on the right)

At this point you might be asking, but what does all of this really mean to me?  Let’s look at a few key metrics:

Pages/Visit is a really good metric to use for understanding how far visitors are diving into your blog.  You want this metric to be high, over 3-4.  As you can see, Side Income Blogging is 1.78.  I want this to be higher and I’ve been working on it.  To increase this number, you have to offer your visitors more content options to click on.  Thus, I’ve been adding more in article links, and adding other related posts to the bottom of my articles.  I’ve seen it slowly trending upwards over the past few months.

Average Visit Duration goes hand in hand with Pages/Visit.  Again, you want this number to be high (over 2-3 minutes).  The longer visitors are on your site, the more content they are reading and the higher change you have for them to signup for your mailing list, click on affilate offers or ads.  My time is 2:20, which isn’t bad and a number I’m pretty happy with.

Bounce Rate is a frequently discussed and high attention metric.  Bounce rate tells you if people are finding what they are looking for or not.  A high bounce rate would indicate that your blog isn’t “sticky”, meaning your content didn’t provide the visitor what they were looking for or did not appeal to them (read: poor quality).  High Bounce Rate can also show you that you aren’t giving the visitor enough options for viewing other content on your blog or that you have links or ads taking viewers away from your site.

The Average Bounce Rate for a blog should be around 70%.  The average bounce rate for websites in general is 40% (per Google), but the average blog bounce rate tends to be a little  higher.  Why?  Well, two fold really: 1) Blogs often have a high percentage of search engine visitors that are looking for an answer, they get it and move on and 2) Blogs often have a high percentage of regular readers that only come to read the latest article published, as they’ve already read previous articles.

As you can see, mine is 74% and I’m happy with that.  One interesting thing you can do, and I’ll discuss how to do that in one of the future articles in this series is to look at Visit Duration and bounce rate of specific articles.  Articles with a low duration and high bounce rate are articles that need to be addressed.  They are either poor quality or not addressing what the visitor is looking for.

Coming Up

As I mentioned early on, Google Analytics is extremely comprehensive and as a result will take me some time to cover, even at an overview level.  We’ve addressed the  Audience Overview page and in upcoming articles in this series, I’ll discuss the other main Google Analytics sections: Traffic Sources and Content.  I’ll also discuss how to use all of this data to monitor and improve your blog.  So stay tuned!

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Jon January 30, 2013 2 Comments
Wordpress

Backup Buddy – How to backup your WordPress blog automatically

One of the most critical blogging tasks is performing routine backups of your blog.  Maintaining frequent backups will keep you from losing all of those articles and custom theme changes that you’ve worked so hard to make.  From personal experience, losing a week or more worth of articles and losing 3-4 months worth of theme changes hurts.  Unfortunately, I’ve been there.

Generally, most hosting companies provide backups of your WordPress blog, but they generally combine all of your files and the underlying database into one very large file that is tedious to work with.   In order to do a full-restore, you will often need to engage your hosts support staff, which can take time.  Most hosting companies also only provide backups as a courtesy, meaning it’s probably not best to depend on them.

With all of these factors in mind, I’ve found it best to do blog backups myself.  There are a number of different options you can use.  I’ll cover my initial method and the option I currently use which is a fully automatic solution with Backup Buddy – I don’t even think about it.

WP Database Backup Plugin

I first started doing blog backups using the plugin WP Database Backup.  This is actually a really great plugin that gets the basic job of backing up your WordPress blog done for free.  I configured WP Database Backup to do daily backups and then email them to a special Gmail account I set-up.  The big drawback with WP Database Backup is that it only backups up your WordPress database and not the rest of your blogs files.

To get a full WordPress backup, you not only have to backup your WordPress database, but also your blog’s files as well.  Backing up your files isn’t automated with WP Database Backup.  In order to get your files backed up, you’ll need to use FTP to download them.  In a nutshell, this is manual, tedious and timely, especially if you have a big site.  Blogging with Amy has a good write-up on this process.

I actually used this process for a few years.  The big problem I ran into was that I had constant and automated backups of my WordPress database, but would always forget to backup my theme files.   Unfortunately this bit me a few times.  Also, being a manual process for the most part, doing blog backups is time taken that could be better spent doing other things on your blog.  I prefer to spend my time doing activities on my blog that help it grow, like writing content.  This is even more true for me currently, as I have about 10 different sites I maintain and have to manage backups for.

An often overlooked and critical aspect of backing up your blog is offsite storage.  Many new bloggers make the mistake of running backups and storing them on the same server as the blog.  As a result, if your hosting company has an issue, or if you accidentally delete your backup directory, you’re toast.  After your backups are complete, you should always copy your backups to offsite storage.  As I mentioned above, my blog database backups were going to GMail as the offsite backup, and I stored my theme backups locally on a USB drive.  Again, tedious and time consuming.

Backup Buddy – fully automated backups

Last year, I ran across a plugin called Backup Buddy.  Backup Buddy is a commercial plugin that completely automates backing up your blog.  The plugin not only backs up your WordPress database, but your WordPress files as well.  I read over the feature list and concluded this was the solution I had been looking for.  Then I saw the cost and hesitated.

Backup Buddy isn’t all that expensive really, I’m just pretty frugal when it comes to my side business.  I generally don’t spend money on plugins or software.  In the case of Backup Buddy, I made an exception and ended up purchasing their Developer license so I could run the plugin on all of my sites.  Here’s why:

Backup Buddy is fully automated 

Again, Backup Buddy is fully automated.  You spend about 10 minutes setting it up, and that’s it.  I configured Backup Buddy to send me an email each time it performs a backup.  The email just gives me peace of mind and confirms my backups ran (or failed if there was a problem).  That’s it.  I don’t spend any time at all and know for sure that all of my sites are backed up.  No manual downloading, no zipping, no copying files around.  While estimating time saved is a bit difficult, I would expect the automation has saved me 1-2 hours a week at least.

Backup Buddy uses offsite storage

Backup Buddy will send your backups, immediately after they occur, to an offsite storage location of your choice.  I personally use Amazon S3.  The size of my backups for about 10 different sites is small enough to where my S3 storage costs are literally less than $1 a month.

Backup Buddy supports storage to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Rackspace Cloud, email and will even FTP your backups to another server for you.  They even recently announced Backup Buddy Stash, which gives you 256MBs of free offsite backup storage.  I’ll continue to use Amazon S3 for now, as I prefer to keep my services separate and Amazon S3 is a highly reputable storage provider.

Easy restores with Backup Buddy

In the event you ever need to restore a backup, doing so is incredibly easy.  You download the Backup Buddy import file and save it to your blog’s root directory along with the backup file you want to restore.  Access the import file via a web browser, and follow the restore wizard.  You can literally have your site restored in minutes.

Not only does the restore process work for restoring backups, but it also works just as well for site moves.  If you need to move to a different host, you literally take a backup of your current site, copy the import file and backup file to your new host, run the import file and your site is now up and running on your new host.  No need to install WordPress, Backup Buddy does this for you.  I’ve also used this same feature to make test sites that are copies of my production site.  This allows me to play around with various theme changes or plugins prior to installing them on my main sites.

To see a full walkthrough of a Backup Buddy backup restore, read my article: Backup Buddy – How to restore your backups.

Wrapping up

You won’t find me promoting many products or services here on Side Income Blogging because I only promote products and services I actually use.  Given I’m a bit frugal, I don’t use that many.  Backup Buddy is actually the only commercial plugin I currently use.  I’ve found the cost to be very well justified in time savings and peace of mind alone.

Visit the BackupBuddy site now to read about it’s features and purchase your copy.  This is a WordPress plugin I strongly recommend to all of my clients.

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Jon November 1, 2012 1 Comment
Wordpress

Why is my blog slow? 10 possible reasons

One of the primary jobs I often do as part of my blog development business is performance tuning client’s sites.  About a year ago, Google modified their ranking algorithms to factor in overall site performance.  Meaning, the slower your site compared to other similar sites, the lower your site and articles would be ranked on the Google SERPs.  As a result of this announcement, I received an influx of requests to performance tune sites.  As a result of this work, I came up with a list of the top 10 reasons why people’s blogs and websites are slow.  The good news?  All of these are pretty easy to fix.

1 – Too many plugins

One of the most common reasons why your site may be slow is due to having too many plugins.  One of the really slick features of WordPress is that there are literally thousands of plugins for WordPress that will do pretty much anything you could ever want.  The downside is that many of these plugins are written by amateur developers and are not performance optimized.  Another consideration is that most every plugin, regardless of how optimized it is, slows your site down a little.  The more plugins you add, the slower your site becomes – Creeping normalcy if you will.

In a perfect world, you shouldn’t run any plugins.  Realistically, you should only run the bare minimum amount of plugins.  I typically don’t have more than 10 installed and two of these are performance optimizing plugins (W3 Total Cache and WP Minify).  You can read about the minimum plugins I recommend at Base plugins for blogs.

Wondering if your site has too many plugins?  Want to see which plugins are having the most impact to your site?  Ironically, I’d suggest installing another plugin called: P3 Plugin Profiler.  P3 will analyze your plugins and give you some really great detail on which plugins are taking up the most time and their overall impact to your site’s performance.  Once you’re done with the analysis, I’d recommend deactivating the plugin until you need it again.

2 – Theme

Another frequent cause of slow site performance is your WordPress theme.  WordPress.org offers many free themes.  Unfortunately many of the themes that look really great, are terribly slow.  I used to run a few of these free themes, but over the years realized that some things are just worth paying for.  All of my sites, except this one, now run on the Genesis theme, which is incredibly optimized and fast out of the box.   Converting this site over is still on my todo list.

3 – Too many pictures or graphics

I love pictures on blogs, especially free pictures.  They draw a reader’s attention, break up the wall of text often seen on many blogs (blogger blogs…*cough* *cough*) and frankly if done right, really make a blog “pop”.  Pictures though can have a negative impact on your site’s performance especially when not used correctly.

Here area few things to consider when using images on your blog:

  • On your main page, use smaller images or thumbnails.  Only show bigger images on your single post pages.
  • Optimize your image files before you upload them.  Image Optimizer is a great tool.
  • Don’t use HTML to downsize your image.  One of the big mistakes people make is uploading a 1024×768 (or bigger) image, then use the img tag height and width attributes to resize the image to 150×150 pixels.  Here’s the problem: the full image is still downloaded to your browser.  If you want the image to be 150×150, resize it first, then upload it to your blog.
  • Minimize the number of images used on a single page.  I was visiting a site the other day, where the blogger included a large amount of pictures in her posts.  This is all well and good, as the primary intent of her blog was photos.  The problem was, she was showing full posts on her main page and showing a good 50 posts on that same page.  It literally took a couple of minutes for her main page to fully load – very very bad.  In this case, I’d recommend only showing one image per post on the main page or better yet show 10 partial posts on the first page and only show 1 thumbnail.  The Genesis theme does this with just a few clicks.

4 – Too much Javascript

Another common cause of overall sight slowness can be Javascript, either too much of it, poorly written script or script that calls out to other sites too much.  Javascript can be a bit tricky, as if you view your site code you’ll often only see a few lines of actually Javascript, but what’s it doing is potentially loading a much larger javascript or HTML file from another location.

Try to minimize your javascript as much as you can.  If a plugin or widget gives you the option of using HTML or Javascript, I personally lean towards using the HTML.  One plugin that will optimize your Javascript (and CSS files) is WP-Minify.  I highly recommend you install and configure it.  Enabling GZip compression (see the next item) will also speed your Javascript load times.

5 – You don’t have Gzip Compression enabled

Gzip compression causes all of your site content to be transmitted across “the wire” compressed.  Meaning that the amount of data transmitted is much smaller. Smaller data = faster load times.  If you aren’t sure if Gzip compression is enabled for your site, visit this gzip compression tester and enter your sites URL to find out.

If your site isn’t Gzip compressing, doing so is really pretty easy.  Just install the W3 Total Cache plugin.  Not only will this plugin enable Gzip compression, but it will also cache all of your site content, both in the browser and on the server.  Caching will cause your site to perform much faster – I’ve often seen it cut a sites response time in half.

6 – Your hosting plan is too small

One of the most common reasons your blog might be slow is due to having a hosting plan that is too small, or a shared hosting plan that isn’t correctly managed by the hosting provider.

Many times as new bloggers, we start off with an inexpensive hosting plan.  These plans generally work well for a few months as we slowly build blog traffic.  At some point, and this particular point is often difficult to recognize, our blog outgrows the current hosting plan.  I recommend monitoring your site performance from day one.  Just check your response times a couple of times a week, and record the times in a spreadsheet.  What you’ll generally notice is that over time, your site progressively slows down, then all of the sudden gets exponentially slow.  This is generally the point where your site traffic has exceeded your hosting plan and a big sign it’s time to upgrade.  Your hosting provider or a consultant like myself, can usually help you determine when it’s time to upgrade if you aren’t sure.

Another common problem with inexpensive plans is that they are generally what’s called “shared plans”, meaning your website runs on a single server along with many other websites.  The number of sites on a server varies greatly from hosting company to hosting company.  The problem with this approach is that if one of those sites has a technical issue or gets a large amount of traffic, the performance of your site will most likely be impacted.  The solution?  You can complain to your hosting provider who can manage this to some level, but generally these types of situations are the reality of a shared plan.  The real solution is to get a dedicated or virtual server.  The downside is the cost.

When picking a hosting company, I always recommend someone that has seamless upgrade options, meaning you can increase and/or decrease you plan as needed.  The three hosting companies I recommend for bloggers are:

  • HostGator
  • Bluehost
  • A Small Orange – This is the provider I run all of my sites on.  They are a little more expensive, but provide a high level of service and performance.

For more detail on selecting the right hosting, check out my article: Hosting for blogs.

7 -You aren’t caching

I already touched on caching above.  Caching is a technology that stores pages when they are requested on disk for fast access.  Enabling caching within WordPress, using a plugin like W3 Total Cache enables both server side and browser caching.  Caching offers significant performance increases for WordPress blogs due to the nature of how WordPress builds pages.  The content for each WordPress page is stored in a database, WordPress pages when requested are built using a combination of code and the actual page content from the database.  In a nutshell, running that code and retrieving the page content from the database each time takes time.   A caching plugin stores the final HTML page, so that the next time it’s requested, it doesn’t have to be completely regenerated.

If you aren’t caching, you should be.  Spend a few minutes installing and setting up W3 Total Cache, it’s time well spent.  One note, if you’re running Thesis – do not enable Object caching in W3 Total Cache, as it will cause your site to not render correctly.

8 -You don’t have the latest WordPress and plugin versions

Another common cause of slow site performance is having old versions of WordPress and various plugins.  WordPress and the many available plugins are constantly being upgraded and improved.  Staying on the lastest versions can not only make a considerable performance increase to your site, but it can also keep you from being open to hacks or security vulnerabilities.

Also make sure your WordPress version and plugins are on the lastest releases.  Fortunately this is easy to do with WordPress’s built in upgrade process.

9 – Too many blog posts on one page

I mentioned this earlier, but displaying too many posts on your main page can quickly slow down your site’s performance, especially if you have large posts or posts containing image or video content.   Every time a post is rendered in WordPress, WordPress has to fetch the post content and render it.  WordPress has to do this for each post.  Thus, if you display 20 posts on a page, and you’re displaying full posts – rendering that page is almost equivalent to displaying a single page 20 times.  For those more technical, I realize this isn’t exactly true – but regardless, the more posts on a page, the slower the page gets.

I generally recommend no more than 10 posts on your main blog page, and even then I recommend only showing “teasers” for each of those posts.  That is similar to what I do here on Side Income Blogging.  I show 2 partial posts, followed by 6 teasers with thumbnails.  I decided on the number of teasers to show based on the length of my sidebar.  As you can see, the main page loads quick, even with the images.

Tip – While some might think this is a bit sneaky, showing partial posts and teasers on your front page not only makes your site faster, but it causes your reader to view two pages on your site.  Why would we want to do this?  That’s twice the advertisements we can show them.  Devious?  Perhaps, but remember, this site is about how to earn a side income blogging and without advertising there is no side income.

10 – You have a hosting issue

Finally, while not common, a cause of your site being slow may be an issue with your hosting company.  Perhaps they are having some type of network issue, hardware problem or configuration issue.  If you have all of the above taken care of, and your site is still slow, ping your hosting company.  Most likely they’ll say everything is fine, but every so often they identify a problem and fix it.  This is one of the reasons I like A Small Orange and pay extra for them – They have 24×7 support and most notably 24×7 phone support – meaning I can get a live person whenever I want.

—===—

Not sure if your site is performing fast or slow?  Visit Google PageSpeed and get an online analysis.  I got an 87/100 on this site, which isn’t bad at all but means I do have a little bit of work to do.  How did you score?

Did I miss any?  Have you experienced another reason for site slowness or have a technique, idea or strategy for making blogs faster I didn’t touch on?  Add a comment and make this article even better!

Photo by: ell brown

 

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Jon June 28, 2012 0 Comments
Wordpress

Register your blog with Google

At this point in our Start a Money Making Blog series, you should have your blog up and running, looking great and have at least 10 high quality articles published.  A common mistake many bloggers make is to think that their blog will just suddenly get picked up by Google and a rush of traffic will arrive. Unfortunately, this is not the case.  Unless your blog is linked from another credible blog or website, Google won’t find you right away, if at all.  In lieu of getting a link from a credible site, one way to get your site on Google’s radar is to register your blog with Google.

Register your blog with Google

To register your blog with Google, we’ll use a site Google provides for webmasters (yes that’s you) called Google Webmaster Tools.  Just login using your Google account (if you don’t have one, create one) and you’ll be presented with the main home page.  Follow these steps to add your site:

  1. Click the Add a Site… button
  2. Enter the URL of your site and press Continue.  One note here, it’s very important that you use the right URL.  If your site is set-up to be preceeded by www, than enter the www, otherwise leave it off.  If you aren’t sure how your site is set-up, login to your hosting account and see how you set it up.  Most sites have the www.
  3. Now we’ll have to verify your site.  I recommend using Google’s recommended method which involves downloading an HTML file and uploading it to your server.  Just follow the instructions Google provides.  If you need a refresher on how to upload a file to your server, read over my What is FTP article.
  4. Once your HTML file is uploaded, click the verify button.
  5. That’s it, your site is now registered with Google.

Submit a Sitemap

Next you’ll want to submit a sitemap so that Google can easily find and index all that great content you’ve been writing.  A sitemap is a special file that is placed on your website that contains a listing of all the URLs to each of your websites pages.  So instead of Google having to find your content, the sitemap actually maps out all of your content for Google so that it can easily find it.  If you’re curious, you can view the sitemap for Side Income Blogging here.

The easiest way to do this is to install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.  Once installed and activated, head over to the settings page (Settings>>XML-Sitemap).  At the top will be text that says “The sitemap wasn’t built yet. Click here to build it the first time.”  Click the “Click here” link to generate your sitemap for the first time.  From that point on, the plugin will automatically update your sitemap and notify Google of your new content.

Now that we have a sitemap, we need to return to Google Webmaster tools and tell it about your new sitemap.  To do this, do the following:

  1. Login to Google Webmaster Tools
  2. From the home page, select your site.  You’ll be presented with the Dashboard for your site.
  3. Open the Site configuration menu to left by clicking on the + sign.  Select Sitemaps.
  4. Click on Submit a Sitemap.  When prompted for the location, your domain name will already be populated.  All you have to type is: sitmap.xml.
  5. Click on Submit Sitemap.
That’s it, your sitemap is now submitted.  Come back in a few minutes, view your sitemap and it should show a green check box indicating it was successfully processed.  If not, just follow the steps above again, you most likely typed something wrong or the Google XML Sitemaps plugin isn’t working correctly.

A little help

While registering your site and sitemap with Google Webmaster tools certainly doesn’t guarantee it will help your site, in my personal experience it has proven to get my sites indexed much quicker and results in seeing search engine traffic much sooner.  As we’ll explore soon, getting search engine traffic is critical for earning money from advertisements.  Getting search engine traffic is the key strategy we’ll explore to earn a side income blogging.  So stay tuned.

Those of you with experience has registering your site with Webmaster tools and submitting a sitemap helped your site?  Any cons that you can think of?  Join in, add a comment!

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Jon July 28, 2011 13 Comments
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