Blogging is awesome right? Yeah, I know… at first blogging might look really hard but with time, after getting the hang of it, you’ll feel the simplicity of blogging.
We started the series on how to set up a successful blog last week, and if you didn’t get to check it out, you can use this link to do so: How To Start A Profitable Blog: All You Need To Know About Blogging Part 1
Starting a Profitable Blog
If you’ve successfully installed your WordPress blog using our guide, then on our today’s post, we are going to discuss how to create a successful blog that loads fast and looks attractive.
Selecting a Theme for your blog:
A theme is important to every blog. In fact, our theme helps us to cover the nakedness of our blog 😉 … without it, there’ll only be just a funny looking website.
Must Read: 5 Unavoidable Tips To Becoming the Blogger Everyone Wants to Associate With
Getting a good-looking and responsive theme does not only increase your blog traffic, it also determines the speed of your blog.
How to get a good theme
By now you must have known that there are two types of WordPress themes, namely; the free WordPress themes and the paid WordPress themes.
The free WordPress themes are themes designed to help bloggers who do not have money to purchase a paid theme.
The free WordPress theme comes with limited design and many of these themes are not responsive to serve your mobile or tablet visitors.
Getting a free theme for your blog is not advisable, but if you must do so, getting a theme from a trusted theme shop is just the best choice. The only site any pro blogger would recommend you to shop for a free theme is from WordPress.org theme shop.
The reason any blogger won’t advise you to get a free WordPress theme outside, is simply because, 99% of the free WordPress themes out there is virus infected.
Installing a virus infested theme will leave your blog vulnerable to attacks like;
- Your WordPress blog can easily get hacked
- Your site might get marked as virus infected by Google and other search engine
- Injection of advertisements and other harmful stuffs…
If you can use the tools I mentioned here then getting a free theme from wordpress.org theme shop won’t be a problem.
Getting a paid theme is always the best, why? Because they are responsive, they come in different awesome design to suit your need and to top it off, paid theme load 10 times faster.
There are lots of sites to get a paid theme that has a good design and awesome speed. But the trusted sites any blogger will recommend you to get a premium theme from are;
- Theme forest
- Studiopress
Most bloggers use premium themes from the above sites because they have proven trustworthy times and times again.
How to create a blog that loads fast
Do note that to have a blog that loads fast, you must have a host with good quality. If your host is poor, your blog’s load time will also be slow, so I will suggest, you choose a reliable hosting provider to host your WordPress blog.
Aside your host, the other major things that normally slow down a blog are;
- Large resolution images
- Blog posts images
- Blog’s background image
- The amount of plugins you use
You can make your blog run fast by tackling the above problems. To know the best tools to compress your blog image, read this post… Best WordPress Image Optimization Method
Plugins to Use for Your blog:
Plugin helps you add functions to your blog that your platform or theme can’t offer.
As awesome and helpful as plugin can be, it can also kill your blog if you misuse it.
I have seen bloggers who’ve used more plugins and at the end, it got their blog crashed… the truth is, installing plugin is addictive because every plugin you install has its usefulness.
Must Read: Revive Old Posts And Increase Blog Traffic Using These Plugins
Installing and using WordPress plugins is awesome but using limited plugins for your blog can help your blog in a great way.
What Plugin should I use?
The type of plugin you use totally depends on you but the limit of your installed plugin shouldn’t be more than 10. But if it should exceed 10 plugins, let your max installed plugin be 15 and not more than that. Doing so, your blog will load fast and look more appealing.
There are many plugins out there but the below plugins are plugin any pro blogger would recommend you to install. These plugins are;
WordPress SEO by Yoast – This plugin helps you get your blog on Google front page by following its suggestion.
Google XML Sitemap – This plugins gives you an XML version of your blog, so you can submit to search engines like; Google and Bing. So these search engines can easily index your blog the fastest way possible.
Smush.it – This plugin helps speed up your blog by compressing your blog’s images
Sharethis – This plugin gives the option for your visitors to share your blog post to their social networks
Revive old post – This plugin helps you to easily share your blog post content throughout your social networks automatically
Contact form 7 – This plugin helps you to create a contact form for your blog
FeedBurner FeedSmith Extend – This plugin helps you to use the Google feedburner instead of its default.
Using the above plugin, will help your blog positively and drive in traffic…
Now that we have selected the perfect theme and using the only needed plugins for our blog… Now it’s time to add menu to your blog.
Menu
What people search and click after reading that epic post of yours, is your “About Me” Page and then your “Contact” page.
In your menu list, the first pages you should think of adding before others, are;
About Me page: This page allows your reader to know who you are and what you represent
Contact Me page: This helps the reader to contact and get personal with you
Advertise or Hire me page: This allows private companies to contact you for business
Having the above pages to you blog is also one of the important steps to carry out when setting up your blog.
To be Continue
On our next post, we shall be discussing more on menus, how to drive traffic to our blog and what monetization option you should use as a new blogger.
Back to you
Do you have comments, questions and thoughts you’d love to share with us regarding the topic? Do use the comment box below and we’ll give you a reply ASAP.
Must Read: Backup WordPress Blog To The Cloud Using this Simple Trick
Do you want to share your experience so far with us? You can also use the comment box below to do so.
Remember that your comments, questions, and thoughts are highly welcome and much appreciated.
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