My WordPress Blog Optimization – Planning

This is the starting post of my WordPress Blog Optimization series, which will be focusing on what i have done to optimize the performance of my blog, involving the discussion on the current problems of my blog and the way to resolve them. Last of all, I will also finalized this series by analyzing my blog’s traffic before and after the optimization.

I mentioned about this series on “Blog revamp in progress” last week but it seems like I have underestimated the amount of time needed to do this, as my original schedule was to publish this post on Mondaym which is exactly 4 days late by now. Even so, looking at the bright side of the story, I’m quite happy with the new layout, and it makes me feel that it’s worth the extra time and effort.

Planning before Optimization

There are 4 things that you need to prepare before you go into the optimization work:

• Decide your goal mainly by listing out any existing issue with your blog,parts you want to improve and also understanding what are the current trends.
• Decide the theme that you’re going to use – either by buying a theme from Theme Forest , joining membership of some available “Theme Clubs” or getting free theme from WordPress Theme Directory. if you do have some web skill , i would suggest you to grab a Theme Framework and build your own theme, which is what i did for my optimization.
• Plugins Selection and Management – you’ll need to go through all your plugins, understand their functions and figure out what are the currently used plugins that need to be removed/replaced and what are the new plugins that suit your needs.
• Literature study on WordPress SEO – read out any Wordpress SEO related blog post and understand what are the changes needed on your blog to make it more search engine friendly.

The unique problem of my blog

One of the problem that I’m facing, which seldom happens to other blogger, is due to the fact that i have changed the domain twice before I landed on the current domain. Because of this change in domain, some of the history post is still pointing to the old domain, which i aim to clean up during this optimization.

I willl be sharing some tips on this problem in the upcoming post for this “Blog optimization 2009″ series. Stay in tuned..

Do you have a plan like this when you are doing optimization and revamp for your blog ?