You want your blog to run like a well-oiled machine. You want your content delivered in a way that your audience can consume it without having to deal with distractions, 404 re-directs, grammar issues, or a blank white screen while they wait for it to load.
Here are 7 secret blog tools that typically remain unknown by your audience, but quietly do the heavy lifting on the backend to ensure a seamless delivery mechanism to their screen.
1. Google Analytics
This is the king of all secret blog tools. Most people have barely scraped the surface of what’s possible with the Google Analytics toolset.
Don’t simply integrate the tracking code and then sit back and watch and count visits to your site. Don’t rely solely on the vanity metrics of website visits. Dig deeper into what the data actually means.
Understand how people are arriving at your site, what devices they are using, where they go once they are there, how long they spend on your site, and what pages they visit.
There is a gold mine of information embedded within Google Analytics. Spend some time getting used to the dashboard interface and then start to look at the various metrics.
TIP: You can use pre-built dashboards created by other users with your own Analytics account. Simply go to your Analytics home and add a new dashboard. You’ll be able to select the Import from Gallery option and see a ton of custom dashboards that you can implement for your own data analysis efforts. Here is a direct link to the dashboard gallery. Take a look around!
2. W3TotalCache
Speed kills.
When dealing with blogs, the lack of speed kills…your audience.
If your website takes longer than a few seconds to load, kiss that visitor goodbye. They have much better things to do with their time than sit around and wait for your page to load.
To help you keep your blog content popping on their screen, look at implementing a caching plugin.
What is a caching plugin? In a nutshell, once items from your site are shown the first time, they are cached (or stored in memory) for a period of time. So, the next time someone loads that same data, it’s already there and ready to be displayed.
Caching plugins can save your site a tremendous amount of time, especially if you typically fail to use best practices for visual content on your site (e.g. large image file sizes).
My favorite caching plugin is W3TotalCache. It’s easy to use and provides out of the box configuration that will help you immediately. With over one million active installs, you can bet this plugin works.
3. Akismet
The good news – Your WordPress installation comes with the Akismet plugin.
The bad news – It is disabled by default.
What is Akismet? Akismet effectively blocks all comment spam on your blog. And trust me, you will get a lot of comment spam.
Comment spam is when bots, or other nefarious a-holes online, post garbage in your comment section of blog posts. Nobody wants to see gibberish in your comments after they read your latest blog post.
It distracts from your readers experience and ultimately dissolves your credibility.
Additionally, Akismet saves you from having to filter and moderate worthless comments on your blog.
To give some real world data in regard to comment spam, here is the latest report from CrazyDadLife.com.
As you can see, the site has encountered a very high number of spam comments over time.
As soon as you load your WordPress installation, make sure you activate your Askimet plugin. Even if you are an established blogger, take a moment to verify that it is turned on and catching all of your garbage.
4. Broken Link Checker
Your audience is annoyed when you give them a link to something wonderful, only to lead them to a dead end 404 page. Nobody likes that!
In fact, when they arrive at that 404 page, they might just click right off your site. Even worse, the likelihood they return is exponentially not in your favor.
But here’s your real problem. After months or even years of blogging, your site is filled with blog posts with embedded links pointing to all corners of the Internet. Trolling through all of your old blog posts to find these broken links is not realistic.
That’s where a tool like Broken Link Checker comes in really handy.
This tool automatically crawls your site to verify all of the links across your entire website, including blog posts, pages, images, comments, and even embedded YouTube video references. Basically everything.
Set the frequency for the link checker then sit back and wait for it to notify you via email of problems. Then hop into WordPress and clean up any anomalies it finds.
5. Grammarly
Look, most of us aren’t experts in English, even if it is our first language.
We mispell words, create massively long run-on sentences, and genuinely butcher the English language throughout our daily lives.
Most people combat this problem by being pretty diligent with spellchecker. If a red squiggly line shows up they inherently want to take care of it.
Grammarly is like spellchecker on steroids. In fact, they claim it takes care of 10 times more mistakes than your trusted word processor.
Readers of your blog posts don’t want to decipher what you might be trying to say. They want it clean and smooth.
The cool thing about Grammarly is that it provides real-time feedback and corrections via browser plugins that allow you to take advantage of its awesome-sauce outside of your WordPress blog post. So, you can use Grammarly functionality when writing emails or updating social media too.
They have a free version that you can play around with to see if it’s something you want to keep using.
I highly recommend it!
6. Speed Tools
Do you like to fish? I don’t.
I simply don’t have the patience for it. Sitting in a boat or along a river for hours waiting for something to bite drives me insane.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, most people online hate to fish as well. At least metaphorically speaking.
People barely have the patience to read what you put on in your blog post. Add a long load time and you can forget about them becoming a raving fan. They will quickly bounce from your site and never come back.
You only have a few fleeting seconds to catch that fish online (ok, I’ll stop with the fish analogy now). But it’s true. You only have a few moments to keep those eyes on your blog.
In order to increase the likelihood of your audience reading your blog post, you need to have it load super fast.
Pingdom provides an entire suite of tools that can help you monitor and fix issues related to your blog’s performance.
With that said, you need to understand that Pingdom is a tool for serious bloggers. Most of us starting out aren’t going to need this sort of enterprise level tool. But, if you are looking for a strong platform for monitoring the performance of your site, check them out.
For the casual to intermediate blogger, here is a tool for you. If you want to get baseline metrics regarding your site’s performance, and don’t want to pay a monthly subscription, then check out webhostinghero.com.
Here is a recent screenshot from my analysis of the CrazyDadLife.com website.
As you can see, the site load time received an A rating overall. Woo hoo!
You can also see that there are a number of metrics and reports available on the yellow tabs under the high level summary report. Definitely check them out and give your site a quick test.
7. Wordpress
That’s right. The final secret blog tool is WordPress itself.
That is, WordPress and all of the ancillary items that come along with it, including plugins and themes.
One of the best ways to keep your site performance humming, and to maintain the most secure environment, is to regularly update your themes and plugins.
Too often people let their WordPress components get woefully out of date. Maybe you are afraid of breaking something when updating. Maybe you are just too lazy to get around to it.
Whatever your reason is, you need to overcome the roadblocks and start to regularly update your components.
Just like you need to change your oil and get new air filters and tires for your car, you also need to update and refresh your blog.
TIP: Implement updates in a measured fashion. Don’t simply click everything and update them all. If something breaks you won’t know what to fix. Update a single component then do some basic user testing of your site to make sure everything is still good. This is especially true for testing the functionality of the affected component.
After you’ve figured out that everything is ok, move on to the next component update and repeat.
Hopefully, you already have these 7 secret blog tools implemented – or at least some flavor of the functionality. The bottom line is, if you want to attract and ultimately keep readers coming to your blog, you need to make sure you take care of it and maintain top performance.
