How to Know it’s Time to Update Your Blog Design

WordPress is a powerful platform. It is easy to setup, and helps content publishers focus on what it is they want to do. Publish content to the web quickly without any programming skills.  With all this simplicity, it is easy for publishers to ignore other aspects of their blog like optimization, performance, analytics, SEO, conversion, and design, and just crank out content. As admirable as content creation might be, revenue and conversion is what makes websites profitable. If you host WordPress on your own domain, how do you know when it’s time to update your blog design? Why would you?

How to Know it’s Time to Update Your Blog Design

You’ve heard and probably believed the montra, “Content is king!” and “Blog awesome!” and “Don’t publish junk!” While I subscribe to these truths in part… with all the emphasis on content, what is often forgotten is the importance of design. The web is a big place, and one big distraction to your target market who is searching for YOU. Here are some things to consider if it’s time to change your blog design.

You’ve Had Little or no Changes to the Current Design Since Launch

You were just happy to get the site online so you could focus on creating content! While the theme you went with and the design of the day may have been “good enough” then, “it’s time to reevaluate” gnaws at you.

How long are people engaged with your content? Are they sicking around to read other pieces of content? These answers can be indicators of how well your design is working to help engage readers.

Social Sharing Options. Perhaps when you launched your blog, you didn’t include the option to share content with others on social networks. This is a must today, and is a great way to increase the reach of your content.

SEO Changes That Current Theme Was Not Designed For

There are finer distinctions of SEO that are more common knowledge today than a year or two ago. Examples include:

• Individual blog post titles and description customizations
• Global options to noindex or noarchive Category, Tag, Author, Date, and Search archives
• The deemphasis of page rank sculpting via no follow attribute
• “Breadcrumbs” placement, such as Front page, posts, pages, archives, and 404 pages.

While many of these SEO related functions can be leveraged using “after install” WordPress plugins, the reality is the more plugins used, the greater impact on the speed of the website. Speaking of  speed…

Performance

“Plugin stacking” is the number one reason for conflicts, crashes, and sluggish load times for WordPress blogs. Bottom line, you only want the plugins necessary for your site to run efficiently, slim, and trim. Changing your blog theme to one that has many of the SEO functions integrated in the theme eliminating the need for additional plugins will enhance the site performance.

The search engines love fast sites. Part of enhancing your design with a new theme is to incorporate design that makes it more friendly to the search engines.

It’s about people! Performance is more than web page load times. What is the growth rate of your newsletter? What percent of visitors are opting in? What percent of optins are converting into sales?

Is a Blog Design Change in Sites Your Future?

If some of the questions here resonate with you, it might be time to get serious about implementing a new theme or enhance certain blog design elements. As for this site? MarketingProfessor.com is due for a change for some of the reasons stated in this post, so stay tuned for a follow up post as to how it went, and the tools (if any) used to make the transition.

Photo credits: shandi-lee moneyblognewz