Adding links within blog posts do a great job in SEO factors as well as keeping readers engaged in reading the content which results in a reduced bounce rate. Many of the bloggers add related posts which is of course a wonderful advantage bloggers can get – related posts will suggest reader where to go next after completed reading one post. Some customize wordpress sidebar to include recent and featured posts as done here currently – even that is good, but not the best.

Recently I came across another wordpress plugin which can help to reduce the bounce rate by much better extent. This is done by replacing the text based related posts with a thumbnail image and text based one. This is almost same as what you see in many news websites or IMDB. An image is worth thousand words and adding an attractive image below the post will make the user tend to click on them to read the next related content.

If you are interested to try out that plugin, head over to Link Within – provide your details, download and install wordpress plugin. Also make sure you have analytics script installed to measure your bounce rate once you change the plugin. If it does not count for you, you may anytime remove that and get back to YARPP.

Also read: Image optimization for website performance

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If you have browsed my blog, you might have observed different widgets on sidebars on posts page and other pages. The difference between them on my blog lies in the fact that my home page / archives / search results page will display only limited number of links to posts with a small extract of description which mostly varies from 3-4 lines. This makes the page to be of low length. In case of single posts, due to my nature of writing long posts, including related posts, comments and other reasons, the page is usually lengthy making it look blank in sidebar.

I make use of that unused space with ads and I don’t want them to be displayed on home or archive affecting the page appearance, so they only appear on single posts as widgets.

If you are interested to try out such an interesting feature, its all because of a plugin which features the customization of widgets on wordpress sidebar. It is Widget Context which brings such a great customization of sidebar widgets.

Have a look into the options available on the widget appearance. It has so many attributes for everything, that even my theme does not have that number of features . You can actually set if you want to display the widget on only some page / if you want to display on all pages except only one. Likely it is for category, tag, year, author archive, all archives, homepage, single post, single page etc.

You can use the same to display the posts of high importance / which are high paying, but not getting much traffic / those which you want to bring to first page of Google from second or you can use it for any purpose, may it be SEO or just distributing traffic, also may be some referral offers. The plugin is also available for WordPress 2.8+ versions.

Are you using Contact form 7? Remove it to optimize performance of WordPress.

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There are few things to be known with these url structures.

Advantages: Easy to remember and type urls, Google "may" give more priority for them while considering for sitelinks [not proved, but I say this by observation] which is really better than some Disclaimer, Privacy, About pages ranking on sitelinks.

Disadvantages: May be clash when the page with same url exist. Say you have a category “My Cars” and a page with same name “My Cars”, if  your permalinks are set like mine, there will be a clash. I think considering this, WP don’t have such option by default.

If you are sure that your blog does not have such clash, you are free to use the second type of category urls. To delete Category/ from wp categories, install and activate WP No Category Base plugin. There are no extra setups in plugin, nor there are any hassles using it. It also works for sub-categories and sitemaps.

Update: Harsh pointed out the problem with this plugin. You will need to have either Redirection Plugin or Platinum SEO plugin to carry redirects to proper pages as your category urls are changed.

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Regular readers here know I have tweaked my theme to a considerable extent and the sole reason behind was to improve the speed and performance of website. During this, I identified many factors which simply overloaded my site and made it slow. Till then Contact Form 7 was used at the contact section. Analyzing it deeply, it was found to create useless dead weight to download which makes the website much slower on low speed internet connections.

Coming to the calculations, one plugin called Contact Form 7 used to put an extra load on each and every page of blog and that total unnecessary downloaded content summed up to 66.9 kbytes. It includes 3 javascripts (two versions of jquery javascript files, one plugin javascript, one plugin CSS). On calculating properly, this extra load will take 5 seconds on a 128kbps connection. We should not forget the fact that even in today’s high speed world, there are many people using internet connections at 56, 128 and 144 kbps connections. Users of slow internet connections simply quit your slow website and start googling for any alternative.

Solution

If you ask me, remove the plugin. There are many other plugins available for same purpose which will not put dead weight on your blog pages.

Analysis with YSlow Firefox Addon on Life Rocks 2.0.

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