When you first started your blog you probably spent a lot of time seeing how it worked and making sure that your visitors would have a positive experience. But blogs are like people, cars, and just about anything else, they need an occasional checkup. When was the last time you tested your blog to make sure it still performed as intended? Here are 8 things you can do check and improve its health.
1. Test Load Time
The load time of your pages is extremely important. If your pages do not load quickly enough, visitors will leave and go somewhere else. This is especially important if a high percentage of your visitors come from StumbleUpon or other social media sites where users have very short attention spans.
Many bloggers test page load times when they first start their blogs, but over time widgets, plugins, and other items that slow down load time may have been added. It’s a good idea to compare the load time of your blog with that of several other blogs to know where yours stands. This can easily be done with the page speed checker provided by Self SEO.
2. Check for Dead Links
If you’re like most bloggers you probably include a lot of links in your posts, both inbound and outbound. Those links may have worked at the time the post was published, but do you know if they still work? Dead links are especially common with outbound links. The blogs and websites you link to may shut down, changes their link structure, or remove a page, all of which will result in dead links.
Checking your blog for dead links is easy with a free tool like Dead-Links.com.
3. Validate HTML and CSS
In order to give your visitors the best opportunity to use your blog in multiple browsers and operating systems you should use valid HTML and CSS coding. Many validation issues will not actually cause problems for users, but valid sites have the best chance of performing well in all situations.
The W3C provides tools for validating HTML and for validating CSS.
4. Optimize Your CSS
Even valid CSS code can be a mess. You may have started with an optimized CSS file, but over time you may have added new code and stopped using some of the existing code. CSS files that are not optimized create a larger file size and possibly slower loads. Two free tools that you can use are CSS Optimiser and Clean CSS.
5. Test in Multiple Browsers
After you have validated and optimized your code, it is a good idea to test your blog in multiple browsers. Use Google Analytics (or a similar program) to see which browsers your visitors are using. You should at least test in the ones that are most common. BrowserShots is a nice resource that will show you screen shots of you website or blog in a large number of browsers. With BrowserShots there’s no need to have all of the browsers installed on your computer for testing.
6. Run a Spider Simulator
It’s always good to have an idea of how search engine spiders are seeing your pages. You can do this with a spider simulator, like the one provided by Summit Media. This tool will check items that could help or harm a spider’s ability to accurately determine the contents of the page.
7. Delete Unused Files, Pages, and Images
If you’re like me you’ve probably uploaded a number of files (especially images) that you never wound up using, or that you stopped using. In most cases, leaving these files around will not cause a problem. However, it makes maintenance easier, improves organization, and decreases the overall size of your blog if you delete files that are not being used, and that you have no plans to use in the near future.
8. Clean Up Comment Spam
Most bloggers use a tool like Akismet to prevent comment spam. Unfortunately it’s not possible to stop all spam. There are most likely some comments on older posts that have slipped through the cracks. Go back through your old posts, or scan through the comments in your dashboard to check for inappropriate ones.
Wordpress users can also read the Wordpress Blog Maintenance Checklist for further Checkup steps.
By going through these steps a few times a year you can be sure that your blog is functioning optimally. Are there any other tests or checks that you perform on a periodic basis?
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