Blog Tips

In continuation of yesterday’s post, we’ll be covering a few tips on how to optimize and clean up your sidebar(s).  This area is often neglected in terms of speed for readers, but is one of the areas that adds the most time to your page’s load time.  It’s now time to optimize and speed it up for readers - there are immense benefits in doing so.

Now, the tips in the following post are general, so you might want to first think about what you want to achieve from your blog.  If you have a personal blog with many personal touches, it might be in your best interests to keep many of the widgets and plugins that you have installed - your readers may find you unique in every one that you have placed on your site.

However, for the other bloggers, here are some widgets that are essential:

• A subscription link for your readers to subscribe.  It will make it easier for your visitors to subscribe, especially if they were not previously aware that they could subscribe and be updated with your site’s content through email and RSS (”what the heck is that?”).
• A link to your archives or about page, or a simple reference point for your readers to discover previous/past content and more information about your blog.  If necessary, this could also be placed in your blog’s header/footer, but can also be placed in your sidebar.
• Advertisements or related material to monetize your site, if you are focused on this.  Otherwise, you might be able to earn money through sponsored posts (which may also involve sidebar ads).
• A “reward” for your readers, such as most commented or recently commented list.  This will ensure that your readers have something to look forward to, even if it is a  simple backlink (a little extra traffic) from your site.

How have you cleaned up your sidebar over time?  What do you believe are the most critical parts to a sidebar?