Blog Tip: Clean Your Blogs Sidebars
ADVERTISEMENTSToday I found a video via Problogger.net of Andy Wibbels giving blog tips for new bloggers to clean their sidebars by removing all unnecessary stuff like twitter, del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos, etc.
This is one common mistakes most new bloggers make. Infact even I made the mistake in my early days of blogging , I used to fill my sidebars with lots of links, buttons of blog top sites, badge, etc and then I realized later how each of them where increasing my page load time and getting my readers distracted.
It is your content that you want your visitors to read, so make it the most dominant visual element on your blog and place stuff on your sidebar that provide value to your readers.
Also you need your pages to load faster as visitors may not wait long enough for your page to load. So it is better to get rid of all things on your sidebar that is of not much use. Though you may consider all things on your sidebar useful, your readers may not!
You can find what stuff on your sidebar your readers find useful by using a service like CrazyEgg to track the visitor clicks.
Here are some more videos by Andy Wibbels on Blogging mistakes
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Posted on May 22nd, 2007 | Category: Blogging |
Ron
May 23, 2007 at 1:10 am
Jhon - How to resulting the articles on sidebar, like all post about youtube in this blog? thank’s
listikal
May 23, 2007 at 4:46 am
Good tip. Now that you mention it, I think I’ve got a lot of junk on my sidebar too. That could be part of my load problems too.
Daniel Becher
May 23, 2007 at 4:56 am
Really, John. Very good your article. I do not consider that mine blog has these excesses. But, at least, I go to reflect on them.
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Vince Cordic
May 23, 2007 at 5:50 am
I definitely agree that too much clutter on the sidebar is a no-no. Lots of bloggers, new and seasoned seem to clutter up there sidebars - it’s very distracting as you mentioned, and it just looks unprofessional most of the time.
Grace
May 23, 2007 at 7:19 am
That’s true. I see a lot of annoying links and such cluttering sidebars a lot! While I do agree with Mybloglog widgets and such, those are too much.
Nirmal
May 23, 2007 at 9:58 am
I too had lot of badges initially, but after that I removed them as it was taking long time to load. This is one of the common mistakes made by all bloggers. Thanks for sharing this video.
Madhur Kapoor
May 23, 2007 at 12:07 pm
You are right John , in the beginning all the bloggers make this mistake .
2 BROS BLOGGING
May 23, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Also, many blogs should clean up all those small icon links at the ends of their posts. I don’t know what half of them do! It’s ok to have a few, but some have 8-10.
tech blog
May 23, 2007 at 5:54 pm
speaking of whichi should clear up my sidebar…..
however i not sure if this would compliment the theme….
maybe tabs….
anyway thanks for the tip.
Pallab
May 23, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Hmmm.. I do have a few badges in my sidebar - Creative commons, opera and a few blog directories. Along with that there is also a visitor map.
David Bradley
May 23, 2007 at 6:47 pm
While you’re at it, you should check over all the Wordpress plugins you have installed. Do you really need Feedburner Stats, for instance? Does Top Commentators and Recent Comments really add something of value to your blog above and beyond the actual posts and their comments? What about all those social bookmarking plugins and meta tag generators? Are they working for you or against you? I wrote about how to create a minimalist wordpress install a while back, right after my minimalist theme post.
listikal
May 23, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Right after reading this post, I went to clean up my sidebar. Once I did that, I completely hosed up my blog. So, I decided, what the heck, why not change my theme all together.
Mission accomplished…and although small, I think my pages are loading much faster.
AmeyJah
May 23, 2007 at 8:33 pm
yeah i agree completely on it. but some widgets(blogger) are necessary . i would always keep recent comments and recent posts with some advertisement(third party) on my blog.
oh forget to mention Mybloglog widget it’s necessary.
Vinod
May 24, 2007 at 11:35 am
Thanks for the tip. Took Twitter out.
latest technology news
May 24, 2007 at 2:23 pm
I also have realized lately ..that the visitors don’t even notice most of the things in the sidebar…so clearing it up sounds to be a good idea
Alex
May 24, 2007 at 4:25 pm
I really like this guy
I have seen this on Problogger and posted on my blog. Is a good thing that you agree him, I have talked with some ppl who said that this is not such a good thing.
Ron
May 24, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Hallo, someone can help me how to display the articles like on john blog about youtube?
many thank’s
Marketing & Monetize Blog
May 25, 2007 at 12:18 am
Maybe if you can be more specific you will get some help…
David Bradley
May 25, 2007 at 3:01 am
Be careful that you don’t clear out links that are providing keyword ranking benefit either to you or your “partner” sites (whether sponsors, friends, or associates)
db
Husbandhood
May 25, 2007 at 9:17 am
I wouldnt mind if you added a couple more things to your sidebar. One thing I would like to see is a Popular posts list. I think you have some amazing posts buried in your blog but people would never get a chance to read them cause they dont know they exist.
James
May 25, 2007 at 11:25 am
Yeah I think everyone makes this mistake, I need to remove some of the junk I have right now.
David Bradley
May 25, 2007 at 11:50 am
A popular posts list (name it Readers’ Choice!) is definitely one to have, either that or a random posts lists (call it Blogger’s Choice!)
db
JohnTP
May 25, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Ron- I manually edited my sidebar file and linked to those posts related to youtube and windows vista.
David Bradley- The Top Commentators plugin is very useful to increase comments, I won’t be disabling it.
Rishil
May 30, 2007 at 7:00 am
I too agree with you John.. early days of blogging we tend to have as many badges as one could get.. well i have now changed my blog for better.. keep up the good work
CHAN
May 30, 2007 at 9:06 am
It’s really useful. Thanks John
Blogging with Desi Baba
June 3, 2007 at 3:48 pm
That’s a common mistake for all bloggers. I have done it and kept those junk on my sidebars for months. I wrote a post that deals with it called Common Mistakes of Blogging
http://desinotes.com/common-mistakes-of-blogging/
Raka Syailendra
June 6, 2007 at 11:17 am
Hmm…very useful thanks alot
John T. Pratt
June 9, 2007 at 12:31 am
That’s a great tip! I have had to remove things from the sidebar on many of my sites because of load time. How do you feel about things like bloggbuzz.com widgets?
Also - anyone that’s using affiliate programs should be very away of what it does to load time. I used to put eBay blocks on some pages using their editor kit and affiliate program, and I found that (even as big as they are) the load time for their code and images was unbelievable. It was killing my site. Amazon aff links are usually pretty good on load time (for me). The last few days (for some reason) adsense has been dragging a log of my pages down.
horisly
June 18, 2007 at 4:35 pm
maybe you are right.
but some social network tools require the widgets show on the sidebar.
Cybersurge.org
June 23, 2007 at 1:42 pm
I hate going to websites that have too much crap in their sidebars, I try not to have my sidebar longer than the shortest post on my blog, that way when trying to find the footer on my blog the sidebar isn’t longer then the content
John Bennett
July 20, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Good Tip John. I started adding these buttons to my site because I saw that a lot of other bloggers out there had them. I’m going to have to test how much faster my page loads when I try removing then (and a cleaner sidebar never hurts).
Thanks again.
Raka
September 3, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Very good tips.
Thx