Advice on improving performance

  • sleeplessdave · Member ·

    Hi,
    My blog used to average around 200/day for the last six months, but lately it’s dropped to 50. I’m looking for any theories as to why that might have happened as well as advice from the WP community on how I might improve the site. I’d greatly appreciate it.

    Dave Yaeger

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-ozmodiar · Staff ·

    Have you done anything differently as far as social sharing, promoting or interactions with the larger WordPress.com community? Frequently people will be very active in promoting and interacting until their blog gets to a specific activity level. Then they decide to take a break (because that stuff does take a lot of time) and just focus on creating content for their blog. While blogs can coast for a while on previous promotion, often they will experience a slide backwards at some point.

  • sleeplessdave · Member ·

    I’m connected to Twitter, Tumblr, Path and Google + and I comment on and receive comments from other WP bloggers daily. I need to create a devoted FB page for the site, but other than that, it’s about as out there as I can make it. The last few days though it’s just not being picked up by search engines any more. I steadily publish about 4 articles a day. Nothing’s changed on my end. Today it’s 27, which I used to get in an hour some days so I’m just kind of at a loss.

  • timethief · Member ·

    How frequently do you submit meaningful comments to posts on other blogs with similar content?

    How frequently do you backlink to posts on other blogs with similar content?

    Commenting is the major source for traffic, search engines are second and social networking is third.

  • timethief · Member ·

    Autoposting is not as effective as manually posting is. We are all downing in a sea of impersonal autoposted content which is duplicated on multiple social media sites. Blogs that publish more than once daily are in danger of being unsubscribed from and unfollowed on social media sites. Do you just autopost to social networks or do you submit individual unique blurbs manually to each and every social network?

  • sleeplessdave · Member ·

    Daily and daily in response to other blogs and backlinking. I’m not sure what you’re talking about by autoposting. I write articles on my blog which then feeds them to the social network sites. Most of the blogs in my circle of WP friends post multiple times a day so I’m not really sure that’s a problem. I’m not spamming the nation. Four tweets a day is not an excessive amount, nor to my personal Google + or Path pages. I’m not seeing a drop in Twitter followers and I’ve never gotten much in the way of referrals from Google+ or Path. The drop is from search engines.

  • timethief · Member ·

    I write articles on my blog which then feeds them to the social network sites.

    That’s autoposting.

  • timethief · Member ·

    Your website is slower than 78% of all tested websites.
    http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/LrmCD/http://sleeplessthought.wordpress.com/

    These are the ways to reduce page loading time:

    1. Edit posts and insert “the more tag” so only excerpts appear on the front page. http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/more-tag/

    2. Reduce the number of posts appearing on the front page here > Settings > Reading
    Blog pages show at most _ posts

    3. Reduce the number of images and or media embeds displayed and/or make them smaller.

    4. Reduce the number of widgets in the sidebar and footer areas.

    You may also consider using a responsive width theme. Responsive width means the layout adapts depending on the size of the device being used to view your site. When responsive width themes are viewed on mobiles sidebars appear below the posts in order to provide as much space as possible for reading.
    If you do switch to using one then disable the mobile theme here > Appearance > Mobile

    To see what others see your blog now depending on the device used use this link http://responsinator.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsleeplessthought.wordpress.com%2F

  • timethief · Member ·

    I also note that your username is linked to the wrong blog. It’s linked to http://sleeplessthoughts.wordpress.com/ Note the “s”.

    Here’s how to link your username to another blog registered under the same username account Dashboard -> Users -> Personal Settings -> then scroll down to Primary Blog. Where it says ‘Primary Blog‘ select the URL for your primary wordpress.com blog and then save changes.

    The change is not retroactive. Thereafter every time you sign into the forum we can all click on your username and your blog will be linked to it. And every time you leave a comment on a blog your username can be likewise clicked and your blog can be instantly located.

  • sleeplessdave · Member ·

    Doh, thanks for catching that and I fixed it. Hasn’t done a thing to improve my traffic or get me back to levels I was at even seven months ago, but that was a big mistake, so thank you.

  • sleeplessdave · Member ·

    OK, I went through, cut a bunch of widgets, am using the link feature to cut down on the full article text and limited to 7 the amount of articles on the home page. I’ll look into responsinator. Autoposting seems a daft name for it because it implies I’m using a bot or something to create content. Why does WP have you automatically link to your social networks if that’s considered a negative? Wouldn’t it prompt you to enter something personalized if that was what you wanted? So you’re saying it’s more effective to unlink all my networks and post each post five times with a personal message? I tried the performance measure speed test, but didn’t see the result you did. Perhaps because I’d made the adjustments first. Who knows. I’m honestly trying to make WordPress work for me, but I don’t see improvement and the fun of actually writing things is getting drained out of me by all of this nonsense.

  • sleeplessdave · Member ·

    I might add that site traffic is not improving (yes I know it’s Thanksgiving weekend) but I mean as an overall trend. The google UK engine seems to have dropped me entirely and I have no idea why.

  • auxclass · Member ·

    There have been problems with access to blogs on WordPress.com from the UK, WordPress.COM has several people working on the issue

    https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/dashboard-errors-related-to-talktalk-isp-issue?replies=2

  • sleeplessdave · Member ·

    That’s good to know. I’m down to 30ish hits a day. The last three weeks have been drops of -19%, -38% and -39%. It’d be great to have some kind of explanation and it started before the holidays so it’d also be great not to hear that one.

  • staff-ozmodiar · Staff ·

    Yes, that TalkTalk issue has been frustrating for everyone.

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