The Technical Side of Blogging – part 1

DudeBloggers, General, Technology 8 Comments

The past two days I’ve been looking for ways to make 7ajidude faster and more optimized so that we can ensure that the site loads faster and performs better overall. As most of you know we’ve changed web hosts a couple of times, and the performance of the website is affected on the location of the host, the uplink provided by the host and the website’s optimization.  7ajidude also provides a lot of photos within posts, which makes the optimization and enhancements a little more tricky. Int the next couple of days I’ll guide you through the steps that i’ve taken to improve the performance of the blog overall. The following are the basic changes that have to be done in the beginning.

1. Ensure you have the latest wordpress  as well as the latest version of your blog’s theme (also have to ensure they are both compatible).

Check the latest version here: http://wordpress.org/download/

This will make sure that you have the latest security updates and fixes to ensure that your blog would be safe from attacks and as stable as it should be.

2. Disable all un-used an un-necessary plugins.

Sometimes we install 3-4 plugins that do the same function especially when testing to add a new feature to the blog, and we forget that all of these plugins will run in the background requesting processor power as well as for some being loaded when the site is loading. Sometimes some plugins actually affect other installed plugins negatively therefore you should always ensure that

3. Make sure all your used plugins are updated.

In wordpress simply go into the plugins page and check that non of the plugins require updates.

 

In part 2 we’ll discuss why you should use spam filters, and consider using Captcha codes and their impact on the performance and load on your website.

In part 3 we’ll discuss using CDN’s and Storage options to speed up the load time of your website.

In part 4 we’ll discuss the different Plugins that we can use to help us in blogging!

Don’t hesitate to add your comments and questions, I’ll try to answer as many as I can as we go along.  Happy Blogging.

 

Comments 8

    1. Post
      Author

      LOL.. I was going to have it all in one post, but i thought a series would be more useful, especially if people were to ask questions. + I can go deeper in each subject without boring the reader with too much technical stuff.

    1. Post
      Author

      Dear memeoq8,

      Inshallah, I will cover the plugins in part 3 of the tutorial, in part 2 i’ll discuss one of the major plugins to save you from all the SPAM comments you may receive. Then the next we’ll discuss all the differnet plugins we recommend and are using. Would you like us to discuss a specific plugin? Is there a certain funcatinality you would like to add?

    2. Dear Dude,

      Can’t wait for part 3 🙂

      Recently, I added many useful plugins after reading some articles/reviews. But I couldn’t understand why some people strongly recommend “AdSense” plugin for WordPress!!….What’s the point? to add google ads!! 😐

      1. Post
        Author

        Adsense plugins utilize the google adsense engine, which in other words are clickable ads which can be placed within your website in different locations that generate revenue if clicked. I.e. you’ll be able to make money from your site. For example the last ad on the right hand panel widget in 7ajidude is an adsense ad (under the f2O ad) which we added to try to understand and determine the revenue that might come from adsense. But we haven’t used any adsense plugins, we simply took the ad code and added it to an html box and placed it wherever we wanted. If you have a high volume of traffic to your site you would generally generate a number of dollars from these ads.

        Some Adsense plugins save you the hassle of changing ads and ad locations and inject the code within the blog making ads appear depending on the settings you choose.

        For more information on adsense make sure your check out : https://www.google.com/adsense/
        For information on how to add adsense without plugins and using a text widget check out: http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/wordpress/wordpress_adsense.htm

        i hope this answered your question. If you have any other questions don’t hesitate to ask 🙂

          1. Post
            Author

            No prb.. Glad to help ! If you are willing to use adsense I might create another tutorial on that and how to implement the ads and customize what sort of ads appear and what to block / hide.

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