The first ever TBEX Asia took place a few weeks ago in Bangkok, Thailand, and was attended by around 600 bloggers from all over the world.
The event saw a combination of parties, networking sessions and blogger panels, which saw experts sharing their tips on all aspects of blogging and social media. One of our favourite sessions was How to Audit your Blog with Mitch Canter, a US-based web designer and digital strategist.
Here are Mitch’s top tips to audit your blog’s design, SEO and performance to ensure you’re delivering the best possible experience to your readers:
Fonts:
When it comes to blog design, it’s best to use no more than two fonts on your site – one for headlines and one for copy. The most important element when it comes to fonts is that they should be easy to read – fonts like Lato and Palatino are visually interesting but still very readable, for example.
A good font size (especially for mobile users) is 16 points, and remember that a font (especially a serif font) on a dark background needs to be larger – and the space between lines – known as the line height – should be around 150%. This can be edited in your blog’s stylesheet using simple CSS.
Colours:
When it comes to colour schemes, there’s a fine line between “visually interesting” and “someone melted a box of crayons”.
Simple black and white schemes look great on lux sites, but boring on other websites. Stick to a simple colour scheme with 3-4 colours – use online colour wheels to find complementary or contrasting colours that will look good together.
Think about what colours express the feeling you’re looking to evoke, and which reflect your personal brand – if your colour scheme and brand don’t match, people will notice that your site feels “off”.
Usability:
The speed with which your site loads is important – Google takes this into account when prioritising search results, along with your site’s mobile responsiveness. Ideally, your site should load in 2-3 seconds.
To test your site’s load time, Mitch recommends several tools – Pingdom, GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed are all useful indicators of how quickly your site performs, and where possible slowdowns are occurring.
If you want to speed up your site, Minify can be used to compress CSS and Javscript code, allowing pages to load more quickly. A typical site may have 3,000 lines of code, but using Minify can compress this by up to three quarters. GZip compression also reduces load time by compressing your web pages before they are sent to the user’s browser and is a great way to optimise your site.
Finally, consider using a cache plug-in if your site has a lot of images and large files on a single page – these plug-ins save a cached version of images and files from your blog, and shows them rather than making multiple calls on your server or database.
Findability
One of the most commonly overlooked elements of making a site findable is using Open Graph – this is the information that is attached to a post, or site, when it is shared on Facebook.
You can easily define your site’s Open Graph information within WordPress if you use the Yoast SEO plug-in, as well as providing specific text that will be attached to a specific post when it is shared on Facebook or Pinterest.
Another box to tick – are you using Twitter cards? These can be applied to your Twitter account almost instantly, and allow you to share posts with a playable video or an extra large image within your Twitter timeline.
Tracking Links
Google Analytics is a great way to track your blog’s performance, but Mitch also recommends using bit.ly, Buffer or Hootsuite to track your links – understanding which links gain the most clicks and at what time can be a great way to boost your blog’s overall performance.
