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Blogging Tip – Balancing Usability And Performance

Blogging is one of the best ways a business can communicate information to interested users. It has also become a powerful tool when it comes to search engine optimisation and social media marketing. The hidden power of blogs is in their ability to become databases of valuable information. One of the keys to maintaining a successful blog is the balance between your blog’s performance and a users ability to access your site and to find information quickly.

I am often amazed to see blogs that do contain useful information not having a simple site search tool.  For blogs of today, it is becoming a must have. It is also one of the easiest tools to add – simply drop a widget into one of the sidebars. Almost all well written blog themes come with a pre-written search widget so there’s no hard work involved.

At the same time, I see many blogs that are so bloated with plugins they take forever to load. This is where site performance becomes important. You need to run a lean and mean blog – a blog that has plugins that are useful for users while not having plugins that are ‘nice-to-have’, but are not really essential.

Whenever you add a plugin you need to assess it on several levels. Will it really help your user; has it significantly changed your site’s load speed; and/or does it really provide you with useful information? Statistical plugins can provide useful information, but they don’t need to be running all the time.  By all means, run them while you are undertaking a marketing campaign, but deactivate them when they are not really showing any major changes in traffic. Google Analytics can do the same job without affecting your blog’s speed.

Users are becoming better educated and more sophisticated when it comes to using the internet. If they are impressed with the content of a web site, they will most likely bookmark it in their browser and return time after time.  Your job is to present your blog in such a way that users do find it useful and bookmark you. Like most offline businesses, once you have won that traffic they will keep coming back, and the majority of the time they will spend money – now that has to be good for business.