In episode 31 of the Niche Blogging Tips Podcast, we're going to talk about a few ideas to make your blog run smoothly, you want to listen to this one, stay tuned.

Welcome to the Niche Blogging Tips Podcast where we help you start and grow a successful blog. And now your host, Andre Vaughn.

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One of the things that we don't talk about in the world of blogging is how sites are ran in terms of, you know, page loading, and all of those things, because most people don't do all of these different tests on their sites, which are factors and in terms of rankings in the search engines, and things like that. So one of the things you should do is you should test your site. And there's so many different tools out there.

One site that I like is called GT metrics, GT metrics, I'll leave it in the show notes. Just a alternative to one of the Google Sites, you can do a Google has a site where you can do it also, being mobile friendly is important, also, and you can test it with a Google tool. Also, to make sure that your site is mobile friendly. If you're not mobile friendly. Right now, I don't know what to tell you. It's 2022. So every website should be mobile friendly. A couple of other important things that I really wanted to talk about, these are some things that came to mind when I thought about doing this episode.

One big thing is you have to have a great hosting plan for your website or blog. And sometimes we kind of get, get, you know, all the different companies, you know, we start thinking about all the different hosting companies, and that matters. It definitely matters because reputation and all that people are going to talk people, you know, we're as consumers, we're going to talk about, um, you know, we're going to read reviews and things like that. So what I mean by a great hosting plan is things such as not just the cheapest plan, I mean, if if you can only afford the cheapest plan, that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. There's things such as VPS hosting different dedicated servers that you can host your website on, and things like that. So it's not about it's not always about the cheap route. If that's all that you can afford, then that's okay. It's a great factor. In having a right hosting plan for the type of content that you're you're putting out, you might have, I don't know, you might upload videos on your site, I wouldn't recommend doing too many of those. But, you know, maybe you're a site where you upload a lot of videos to your site, and you can't have a regular hosting plan for that, because it's gonna, your site's gonna load slow. And this just takes up a lot of space, if you're doing that, so be mindful of the hosting plan that you're using for the type of content that you're putting out.

Another idea I was thinking about, in order to make your blog run smoothly, and I've said this, I believe in previous episodes, you have to have well, this part I never say it in previous episodes, but the next one I've said in episodes before but this one is you have to have the right or correct type of plugins. Plugins are the programs are that kind of kind of equate them to like an app on your phone. The functionality so it's certain programs that you need in order to do the functions of your website. So that's what a plug in is. So I'm most you know that but just in case, somebody's listening that doesn't know exactly what a plugin is. There you have it. Plugins, I guess the right or correct type of plugins, there's, there's many you can use depending on what what you're trying to do. One of the important plugins is Yoast SEO. It's the first All In One SEO solution for WordPress and includes on page context analysis, XML sitemaps, and a whole lot more other things, I think Yoast SEO is great when you are setting up your content because you can see everything how it's viewed in Google. And I think it's a really cool tool for you to use.

I also think you should have a plugin, like Broken Link Checker, a lot of times on websites, you run into different links, you might be doing some, not just internally, but more importantly, outbound linking might link to some off site. And you may have an issue with it, you could be linking something internal, you know, a previous blog post or a page on your site, and the link becomes broken somehow. And if you don't fix that, Google's not going to rank your site high. So that's why that plugin is very important. Broken Link Checker also have plugins, that's that I will recommend to like easy Table of Contents, just a table of contents plugin, you can actually see it on, you don't know what you're watching, if if you're if you're doing it on the mobile, but on a desktop, you can, you can really see the way my site is the niche blog and tip site. Also, so and that's, it adds a user friendly and fully automated way to create and display a table of contents generated from the page content. So I think it's, it's cool. And it's definitely some that can help you on your blog. There are a lot of other different plugins that you can use, but use use the right ones.

The next point I was going to make, in terms of having your blog run smoothly, is not having too many plugins and I spoke about this, and I'm sure I'll speak about it again, you cannot have a bunch of plugins on your site, it's going to slow your site down, have to be mindful of that. And what's too many always say having anything over like 20. And that's really too many, if you want to know the truth about it. If you can minimize it, if you can have 10 plugins, you'll be fine, your site will be just fine. Just make sure they're the right kind of plugins, because the more and more you add to those sites, especially if you're using a hosting plan or a regular hosting plan, you're not going to have the bandwidth to use all of those different plugins. And that's what it will start slowing your site. Because you have all these different codes and CSS and all these different things. You know, you're trying to optimize images and things like that, and it is just not working for you. So and that's another thing.

Also just to piggyback, make sure you have a plugin that's good at optimizing your images, that is very important. So make sure you have a plug in optimize your images. And there's a lot of them out there. Also, one of the ones I use is called Auto optimize. So it's pretty cool. Plugin Autoptimize. So make sure that you have those plugins and make sure you have the right plugins, make sure you don't have too many plugins.

Like I said previously, one plugin that's a must as a security plugin, make sure you have a security plugin and error a bunch of free ones out there. And there's a bunch of paid ones out there, then you have some that has, has both the one that I like is Wordfence Security. And thing I like about that it's a it's a multi use multi use plug in, you know they have an anti virus thing I like the the firewall that they provide for your website and it says we're wordfence includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that were built from the ground up to protect WordPress. And it says our Threat Defense feed arms wordfence with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe. So a security plugin is a must. So make sure you remember that not just throwing it out there word wordfence is the name of a plugin that I like.

I spoke about mobile friendly. And the GT metrics also. So yeah, those are just a few ideas to make your blog run smoothly if you can do that. That's the things that I mentioned in this episode that's going to be at 85% Why Your website is slow. It's things that that I spoke about in this episode, so it's not it is a big deal. So I'm not gonna say it's not a big deal. Almost said that but it is a big deal. Because you want to make sure that your site ranks your content ranks for, for you know what you want it to rank for, you want it to be on the first page of Google so, and that's a big factor. So make sure that your blog runs smoothly by listening to some of the things that I spoke about. In this episode. I'll leave some of those things in the show notes to add nichebloggingtips.com/episode 31. And I'll make sure I put those there for you guys. Hey, check out our private Facebook group also at niche blogging tips.com forward slash group and don't forget our YouTube channel and nichebloggingtips.com/YouTube. A thanks for listening to this episode. And I am sure you will hear from me again. In the next episode, of course. Thanks. And enjoy.

The thought of having a blog is so important, especially when you're new but just like a lot of new bloggers, you get stuck in a lot of different places because you're getting all this information from all these different places, all these different bloggers or whatnot. But what we did was we put together a free mini course we call it the five day blogging mini retreat is what we call it and you can get that at nichebloggingtips.com anywhere on the website, nichebloggingtips.com Sign up for a Five Day Blogging Mini Retreats a free mini course a Free Five Day Blogging Mini Retreat, check it out at nichebloggingtips.com

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