3 Super Practical Steps to Speed Up Your Site to Increase Conversions

3 Super Practical Steps to Speed Up Your Site to Increase Conversions

3 Super Practical Steps to Speed Up Your Site to Increase Conversions

 

 

This blog post is for busy bloggers and online entrepreneurs who want practical step-by-step recommendations on how to improve their site speed. FREE interactive Speedup Your Site Checklist is included. If you look for a proven FREE solution to make your site load faster, improve your site visitors experience, and increase your conversion rate but you don’t have time to learn about redirects, cashing, and CSS optimization – keep reading.

You probably care about your Google ranking a lot. Who doesn’t? Your Google ranking and your traffic conversions depend on several factors, like your site optimization, how easy it is to navigate it, and how often you update your content. But most importantly, your site loading speed. No one likes slow sites. If your site or blog is S-L-O-O-O-W you will lose visitors for sure. And most likely, you will not get the best ranking on Google. I bet this is not what you want. So, how slow is slow? According to Hubspot, the ideal loading speed is 1.5 seconds. If it takes longer… sorry your site is slow. In fact, 47% of consumers expect websites to load in less than 2 seconds. One second longer and you will lose 7% of your conversion.  Also, according to Google, your bounce rate (people who abandon your site) increases with every second!

 

 

 

3 Super Practical Steps to Speed Up Your Site to Increase Conversions

 

For those of you who do want to know what affects your site speed here is an excellent Google resource.

The tools and plugins I will be talking about are for fixing major issues that slow down your website.

Let’s break it down into simple steps.

First, you need to find out what your site’s loading speed is now. You can use Pingdom to test your site speed. It is very easy. Make sure you set your location in the drop-down menu closest to where you are. Say, I am on the East coast. I chose NY from the drop-down menu below, as it is closest to me. I recommend running this test several times and find out your average.

 

 

3 Super Practical Steps to Speed Up Your Site to Increase Conversions

 

If you are not impressed with Pingdom, try these free tools:

Now let’s make your blog or site faster😊

 

 

1. Be smart about your images

Using images and videos is very important for your content to be noticed and shared. However, big images, heavy sliders, galleries and videos uploaded to your site can slow your site down. Here are a few things you can do to keep your site light and speedy.

 

Image optimization

Let’s make sure that your images are not only SEO optimized but also compressed. Using high-quality images is necessary for your blog or site. They make your content more appealing and easier to read. Just don’t forget to optimize them:) If you don’t use image galleries in your every post and use just a few images per a post, the sure way is to compress images manually.  You can use Tinypng.  Compress your images before you upload them to your WP media library. If there a few of them it will take only a minute to shrink them. Tinypng will compress your images without compromising their quality. This is not the fastest way to compress your images but it is free and you have full control over it. Here is an example of images before and after compression using Tinypng:

 

Before (size 69 KB)

 

3 Super Practical Steps to Speed Up Your Site to Increase Conversions

 

After (33 KB)

 

 

 

I personally cannot tell the difference. If you use really big images (like I do:) ), reducing their size will make your site load faster. If you don’t want to spend time compressing your images manually, you can use these FREE image compression plugins:

 

If you use image galleries instead of just a few images, there are good plugins that will help you to organize and optimize your images into galleries without slowing down your site. You can use NextGEN free plugin to optimize your image galleries.

 

 

Sliders

Creating and using sliders is the best way to show off your products or services, your blog posts, and upcoming events. Sliders are the best miracle workers to grab your readers attention. Meta Slider free plugin totally rocks it.

 

 

Videos

Videos are really important to attract and keep your audience engaged. Your site needs videos! However, do NOT upload them directly to your site! Use Youtube, Vimeo or Wistia and provide a link on your site (WordPress will embed it automatically).

 

 

2. Plugins to speed up your site

 

As I mentioned before, this blog post is for busy people, looking for practical advice to speed up their site and increase conversion. So, if you don’t want to dive into understanding things about redirects, cashing, and CSS optimization, these plugins will take care of those issues for you. Note: Installing all of them will not make your site the speediest in the world. 🙂 I would recommend playing around with those plugins carefully. Try to install one at a time. Measure your site speed before and after you install it. Sometimes new plugins conflict with your existing plugins or your theme and make your site slower instead of faster. It happened to me. It may take you several tries to find the one, working the best for your site. W3 Total Cache works the best for me.

 

Plugins to speed up your site:

 

 

3. Do some cleanup

 

 

3 Super Practical Steps to Speed Up Your Site to Increase Conversions

 

 

Be plugins savvy

 

What do I mean by clean up? I mean getting rid of plugins you are not using. I know how tempting it is to download a ton of free plugins just in case. But the more plugins are on your site, the more code to load. If you delete all plugins that are not contributing to your site’s functionality and plugins with duplicating functions, your site will be faster.

Be reasonable about the number of plugins you download. If you don’t know what plugins are slowing your site down and what plugins to delete, here what you can do. You can also test your plugins performance and see what plugins are the slowest and find a better alternative to them (a faster plugin with the same functionality).

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) is a popular WP plugin by GoDaddy to check your plugins performance. Sadly, this plugin has not been updated for a while (at the time of this post). But it is still what most people prefer.  You may also want to check Query Monitor plugin. It does the same.

 

 

 

3 Super Practical Steps to Speed Up Your Site to Increase Conversions.

 

 

You need a plugin to get rid of plugins. LOL. But you can uninstall it after using it. You may also organize your plugins with the Plugin Organizer. It will do all sorts of things for you, like selective plugin loading, disable some plugins by role etc. More information about this plugin here.

 

 

Consider carefully your 3d party integrations

 

If you use third-party integrations on your site, like appointment scheduling services, or social media buttons, easy social media sharing options etc. You should consider whether the real benefit of the service is worth losing those milliseconds. Some of them sure are worth it. You can play around, measure your site with and without them (deactivate them for a bit) and make your decision. The worse offenders for me personally were AddToAny platform and Click to Tweet. As much as love them, I had to let them go :((

 

Download your FREE INTERACTIVE SPEED UP YOUR SITE CHECKLIST. Click on plugins names to read more about them.

These are all plugins and tools I talked about in this post:

 

 

3 Super Practical Steps to Speed Up Your Site to Increase Conversions

 

 

Bottom line: Check your website speed, optimize your images and all visuals, choose a plugin that will take care of all technical stuff for you, go easy on plugins and third-party integrations.  Check out my Freebies for some cool stuff to promote your blog!

6 Effective Unknown Blog Promotion Tools

6 Effective Unknown Blog Promotion Tools

 

 

I stumble over many interesting new digital tools and platforms daily. Some of them are new and have not gotten their momentum in the social media yet. The others have been around for a while but do not have nearly as much buzz among bloggers as they should have. Here are my favorite 6 effective unknown blog promotion tools. I say ‘unknown’ as relatively speaking. I think these platforms/tools are a bit underrated among bloggers and entrepreneurs given how easy it is to use them and how much referral traffic they can bring to your site.

 

 

Nouncy

Nouncy is a free promotional tool.It is the ultimate free marketing tool to amplify your announcements in the social media and create buzz. If you have an event coming or launching a product, let your social media followers know a couple of weeks in advance about it. Give them a bit time to gain momentum. Then sit back and watch the social media magic happening – creating a buzz about your brand! You can read more about how to use Nouncy here. Their manual is very explanatory and helpful.

 

unknown blog promotion tools

 

 

Related post: 5 Places to Promote Your Blog for FREE and Get Insane Traffic

 

Notey

Notey is the largest blog search engine. It is one of the unknown blog promotion tools among many bloggers. Not sure why because it is great. It is such an easy way to find top bloggers in your niche and expand your network!  Notey monitors and sorts blogs out based on topics. There are 500,000 topics. You can search for literary any topic you can think of. I randomly searched for ‘interior design’ and over 11k most recent updates popped up. I can read about it for days.

 

6 effective but unknown blog promotion tools you should try to increase your traffic

 

You can find top blogs in your niche using Notey. This is the perfect way to build your professional network and keep an eye on your competition. The best part is that you can submit your content too! Notey admins are always looking for interesting stories and ideas. Give it a shot. Why not? Use this email [email protected] to share your content and ideas with Notey. If your blog is featured on Notey it is a great opportunity to put your content in front of your target audience. I think it is a great free promotional opportunity you cannot miss.

 

 

IdeaMensch

IdeaMench is a platform where interesting people with interesting ideas get interviewed. The interviews are published on the website. Do you have to be a celebrity to get interviewed? No. You have to have an idea that you did not give up in your life. IdeaMensch published interviews with interesting people who did not let their ideas go and turned them into success stories and business.

 

Here is what their About page says ‘IdeaMensch is an open community created for people who bring ideas to life.’

Please, share your idea with our community by contacting IdeaMensch.

I am sure many people will find your story interesting and inspiring.

 

 

Medium

Medium is one of my favorite platforms I use for my clients. It is a platform where people share their stories.  I am sure you have a story to share! What kind of stories? Anything from world affairs to personal stories can be on Medium. Medium sorts them out, picks the best of them and delivers them directly to your home page.

 

6 effective unknown blog promotion tools you should try to promote your blog in just 1 hour

 

It is SO easy to use! You can create tags and search for top stories. And it is even easier to post. The interface is similar to FB: you write and post. The key thing here is to optimize your content for keywords. With consistent presence and high-quality helpful content, you can get traffic from Medium to grow your blog!

 

 

MyBlogU

MyBlogU is a truly amazing and truly underrated among other unknown blog promotion tools. It is a platform for collaboration with other bloggers. Lots of bloggers think of other bloggers as ravels. That is not true! You will not survive in the blogosphere without help and support of other bloggers. That is exactly what MyblogU has to offer, a supportive community of bloggers. You can find other bloggers to brainstorm your ideas with, ask for resources and even interview some of them. One of my favorite features of MyBlogU is finding media representatives. Yes, right. You can find media here too to get your story published. Click here to get support from your blogging friends.

 

 

LikeAlyzer

This is an awesome free tool to get a snapshot of your Facebook performance and a gist how to improve. FB Insights is the best tool for your Facebook analytics but with LikeAlyzer you can see it very concisely. You will see what you have work on to increase your Facebook business page performance.

 

unknown blog promotion tools

 

Like with any promotion strategy, consistency is a must. If you decide to give one of these tools or all a try, I suggest you be consistent. Watch your Google Analytics statistics to see which one of them will bring you the most of your referral traffic. Good luck with your blog!

 

Here is what you can do next:

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5 Epic Places to Promote Your Blog for FREE and Get Insane Traffic

5 Epic Places to Promote Your Blog for FREE and Get Insane Traffic

 

5 Awesome Places to Promote Your Blog for FREE

Have you heard of the 80/20 marketing rule? What it means is that you spend 20% time writing your content and 80% of time promoting.  Luckily, there are SO MANY WAYS to promote your content. Sometimes it is overwhelming.  I find it what works the best is when you focus on a specific promotional task. Here is what you can do now. If you’d like to extend your blog’s business reach, get more customers and drive more traffic to your site, you can submit your content to these 5 highly effective platforms right now to get more traffic to your site. (much more traffic!)

Here we go!  5 Places to promote your blog for FREE and get tons of traffic

 

 

Bloglovin’

5 places to promote your blog for free

 

 

Bloglovin’ is all your favorite blogs in one place. How cool is that? Bloglovin’ has over 25,000,000 visitors per month! Don’s miss your opportunity to put your blog in front of such massive audience!

Encourage your readers to follow your blog on Bloglovin. Get your Bloglovin’ widget here.

Here is more information how you can benefit from using Bloglovin’

 

 

Inbound.org

5 places to promote your blog for free

 

 

Inbound.org is one of my favorite places to promote your blog for free. It is such an awesome community of marketers, who share and discuss information about online and inbound marketing. Feel free to join. You will find tons of useful information posted daily. You can be a part of this awesome gig too.

Before you post, check guidelines to avoid surprises and frustration.

If you have a marketing blog you can submit it to the list of the Top 50 Marketing Blogs on the Web. Amazing blogs and tons of useful information. See for yourself.

 

 

Jayde

5 places to promote your blog for free

 

 

Are you interested in more places to promote your blog for free? Go to Jayde! It is a B2B search engine. Jayde has over 2 million unique business websites in its index. It has a great system to categorize and index submitted sites. It has a very clean and easy to navigate design. Submit your site and get more visitors. Why not?

Promote your blog by submitting it to the Jayde directory.

 

Related Post: 6 Effective Unknown Blog Promotion Tools.

 

Growth Hackers

5 places to promote your blog for free

Growth Hackers is one of the well known among marketers places to promote your blog. This is a great place for you to publish your content and get more following. You can start with going to their Community page and submitting your content. You can submit your post here.

 

 

On Top List

5 places to promote your blog for free

 

 

On Top List is a popular blog directory. You can submit your site. It is free but you have to but their badge on your site. Here is how they describe on their site your benefits from joining:

  • be found by customers and readers
  • promote and drive traffic to your site
  • get analytical insights to keep a close eye on your site’s performance.

This is their FAQ page if you want more information. This is where you submit your site.

If you are interested in exploring some paid options for promoting your content, here is a couple of my favorite ones Outbrain and Taboola. The reason I like them is you can control your budget. There is no minimum or required amount for you to spend to be able to use these services. They are both very effective.

Good luck with promoting your blog and let me know how it goes:)

 

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5 Unbelievable FREE Tools to Spy on Your Site Visitors

5 Unbelievable FREE Tools to Spy on Your Site Visitors

 

 

5 Incredible FREE tools to get to know your site visitors better to increase conversion

So, you are killing it with your high-quality content, robust social media strategy, and awesome Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. Great! Are you getting pretty decent traffic but not enough customers? Then it is time to look at your site visitors behavior to understand what they want.

When you see how they behave on your site, what they click on the most, when they lose their interest and abandon your site (silly them!), how far down they scroll etc. you will be able to make changes to your site and blog to satisfy your visitors needs and convert more of them into clients and customers.

Here are 5 FREE tools you can use to spy on your site visitors. They are very easy to use and pretty cool.

 

SessionCam

 

spy on your site visitors

 

SessionCam is one of the oldest tools on the market to track site visitors behavior. It is the easiest way to increase your website conversion by analyzing how your visitors interact with your site. Some of the features of this tool are watch recordings of every customer behavior on your site, visualize how they behave on every page and identify struggles they have on your site.

Cost: FREE-$50/mo and up.

 

Crazzyegg

spy on your site visitors

 

 

Here is a mighty awesome tool to spy on your site visitors!  With Crazzyegg you can see what visitors click on your site. Here is what you can do with Crazzyegg.

  • Create a heatmap (see where people click on your site)
  • Confetti (see all clicks on your site segmented)
  • Scroll map (see how far down they scroll and when they abandon your site)
  • Overlay (number of clicks on each element of your page).

What functionality are you interested in? I would go ahead with all 4 of them:)

Cost: Free trial, $9/mo after

 

 

Hotjar

spy on your site visitors

 

This tool has been around for a while.  Hotjar will visualize the behavior of your visitors by representing their clicks, taps, and scrolling on your site. You can get started here. Also, there is an option for you to create feedback polls and surveys to understand what your web and mobile visitors want and what’s preventing them from achieving it by targeting time or event-based questions [source Hotjar site].

Cost: Free or $29/mo

 

 

 Mixpanel

spy on your site visitors

Mixpanel is one of the super powerful tools to spy on your site visitors. What can you ‘spy’ on? The answer is pretty much everything, including actions people take on your site, where and why you are losing customers, why your users are. Unbelievably awesome!

Cost: Free plan, or $99/m0

 

Luckyorange

This one is my favorite. Luckyorange is a bit different from the ones I ‘ve written above in how it presents its data. You will see a new dashboard like that.

spy on your site visitors

 

You will see a real-time count of all the people, top sources that brought people to your site, see changes in your traffic over time. You will even be able to monitor your tweets. Wow!

Cost: Free or $10/mo

Regardless of what tool you choose, you will be able to understand your visitors better and improve your blog or site. Maybe you will need some adjustments to your content or maybe you need to time your popup windows differently not to lose your customers. You will see and decide and improve your conversion. Please, let me know if you have any questions or need help.

You can check out my FREEBIES here.

Follow me on the social media to get more practical information how to promote your blog.

 

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5 Fantastic FREE WordPress Plugins to Promote Your Blog

5 Fantastic FREE WordPress Plugins to Promote Your Blog

5 free plugins to promote your site

 

5 Unbelievable Plugins to Promote Your Blog. Yes, Please!

 

The awesomeness of the WordPress content management platform is that you can constantly improve and update your site.  For example, you can use a plugin to add a beautiful gallery of images, or add a call for action to your site, or add your Instagram stream to your Homepage. Just about any idea you can come up with there is a WordPress plugin for it:)

 

How about plugins to promote your blog?  Here are 5 FREE proven to work plugins to promote your blog by attracting customers, making them come back, converting them into customers by building your e-list, and improving your site performance?

If you don’t have these plugins you can download them by clicking on the name of the plugin.

 

Smush Image Compression and Optimization

 

 

I am a big fan of using images on my site to attract new visitors. A picture is worth … you know. I use such free resources as Pixels and Unsplash to find high-resolution free to use images. High-resolution p sure look good but they are big and can slow down your site and hurt your SEO. One of the easiest ways to solve this issue is to install a plugin called WP Smush. It will help you to resize, optimize and compress all of your images.  Here is what the plugin developers say,

“In addition to smushing your media uploads, you may want to compress the images stored in other folders. Smush now lets you compress any image in any directory so that you can optimize all the images on your site – including NextGEN images, images stored on Amazon S3 using WP Offload S3 and images in EVERY WordPress plugin and theme package.”

After your image has been optimized you will see this on your dashboard sidebar.

 

Do you know what the best part is? The quality of your images will not be compromised! Same beautiful photos and a faster loading post or page. Wow.

 

 

AddToAny Share Buttons

 

5 FREE WP Plugins to Promote Your Blog

 

Share your awesome content to get more traffic! Make it super-duper easy for your visitors to share your content by installing social media buttons. Out of dozens of social media sharing buttons plugins, AddToAny Share Buttons works truly the best. This social media sharing plugin helps people share your content to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, and over 100 more (!) social media sites & apps. Literally, think of a social media platform you want to connect to. And here we go… You got it!

When you install share & follow buttons you will get share counts floating share, custom placement of your buttons (before content, after content, or before & after content) and many other customizable features to share your content.

Active Installs 400,000

Rating 5 stars

 

 

Related: 6 Effective Unknown Blog Promotion Tools

 

 

The Sticky Menu (Or Anything) On Scroll

 

 

 

As you probably know, your visitors will give no more than 7 seconds of their time before they move on. You need to use those precious seconds wisely to draw their attention to what is the most important to you, like a call to action, for example. The Sticky Menu (Or Anything) On Scroll plugin will allow you to stick the most important element on this page/post to the top to get your readers attention.

This plugin allows you to make ANY element sticky (such as a Call To Action box, a logo, etc.) when it hits the top of the page when you scroll down. Although this is commonly used to keep menus at the top of your page.

Active installs 30,000

Rating 5 stars

 

 

MailPoet Newsletters

 

5 FREE WP Plugins to Promote Your Blog

 

We all know that traffic is not all created equal. What you probably want is visitors interested in buying your product and services. You need to grow your list of subscribers. MailPoet Newsletters is the best FREE alternative to other plugins you have to pay for. You can use this plugin for creating newsletters, automated emails, post notifications, and autoresponders. You can capture subscribers with this signup widget too! It is super easy to use. You can drop your posts, images, social icons, change your fonts and… Voila!  You have your newsletter ready to grow your email list!

Active Installs 400,000

Rating 5 stars

 

 

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP

 

5 FREE WP Plugins to Promote Your Blog

 

This plugin is pure awesomeness. Monitoring your blog’s content performance is something you want to do all the time. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP brings your Google Analytics right to your dashboard. Yes, you can check your website’s traffic right from your WordPress dashboard. It enables you to track your site using the latest Google Analytics tracking code and allows you to view key Google Analytics stats. You will be able to see

  • Sessions, organic searches, page views, bounce rate analytics stats
  • Locations, pages, referrers, keywords, 404 errors analytics stats
  • Traffic channels, social networks, traffic mediums, search engines analytics stats
  • Device categories, browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, mobile brands analytics stats.

On your Dashboard look for something like this after you install this plugin. And the drop-down menu will allow you to see different parameters.

 

 

This plugin will give you a rather comprehensive picture of your traffic but you still have to check your Google Analytics for your deeper traffic flow analysis.

Active Installs  1+ million

Rating 4,5 stars

 

 

Here is what you can do next

You can check out my Freebies page for more FREE tools to promote your blog or site. Follow me on Facebook for tons of useful information to promote your blog. See those social media buttons to the right? 😉 Thank you!:)

 

 

 

 

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