Tips & Tricks

4 Tech Issues That Are Ruining Your Blog and How to Fix Them

Tech problems that can affect your blog’s performance range from a poor choice of host to a badly planned collection of plugins. These problems that are often overlooked by bloggers who focus more on content and marketing can nullify all your hard work. Understanding what to watch out for and having plans in place to deal with any of these issues will reduce your website downtime, improve your Google ranking, and prevent you from losing visitors.

4 Common Tech Problems That Put Down Your Blog’s Performance

1.    Excessive use of plugins and widgets

While widgets and plugins are extremely helpful for making your site more intuitive and enhancing its functionality, all these great things bring down the website loading speed by default. Kissmetrics has a great infographic on the subject of how web page loading speed affects your traffic. The most important thing to take from it is that 40% of people will abandon your blog if it takes over 3 seconds to load.

As the blogs of today must have some pretty ‘heavy’ high quality visuals, adding plugins to the mix will affect website performance greatly. You also need to consider that some plugins and widgets might interfere with each other and cause the website to crash because of this. This kind of problem can also occur when the widgets are updated.

To avoid this kind of problems you should use only those plugins and widgets that are absolutely necessary. This shouldn’t be hard seeing that minimalistic web design is in trend today. You also need to run complete website tests regularly and have an additional check after every update of any component.

2.    Bad web hosting

If you are a blogger, you are most likely using a shared host, which increases the risks of technical problems by default. The equipment used by the host as well as their tech maintenance and customer support service all factor into determining the reliability of this service. If you want a blog that performs as well as possible, you’ll need to choose the best affordable web hosting Canada can offer.

When choosing a host, look for independent reviews of the service and monitor the uptime of websites hosted on its servers. In fact, you can find a good hosting this way. Simply use tools like HostingChecker to determine who hosts the website that you like. Then look what kind of packages the service has. You should look for offers with unlimited bandwidth and sufficient storage space. Be sure to find out how the server will react to spikes in traffic as you don’t want to lose many hard-won visitors because your website crashes.

3.    External media embedded in the pages

Tech problems that can ruin your blog often occur because of the top-quality content you work so hard to create. The problem is that the media files embedded into your website might be too ‘heavy’. In this case, pages will take longer to load and you’ll be losing hundreds of prospective subscribers.

Posting visual content, like videos, presentations, pictures, etc. is extremely effective for keeping your subscribers engaged. This means that you cannot afford not to use this media. Therefore, you have to optimize it the best you can. Note that optimization must be dynamic so the content can adjust to desktop and mobile browsers equally well. Tools you can use for this include Chipchamp, Optimizilla, and Kraken.

4.    Poor header configuration

You should use caching in order to make your website load faster. However, when you do this, incorrectly configured Cache-Control and Expire headers will interfere with the caching process.

To prevent this problem take your time configuring Expires carefully. Set them for the minimum of a week. You should choose bigger terms for content like PDF documents, CSS files, media, etc.

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