Check for Your Blog Frequently for Issues
Checking you blog frequently for any issues is an important task as we need to retain more and more first time as well as regular readers. Once a reader gets a thought that your blog has some issues while loading or broken sidebar or any script issue, they he may be reluctant to visit next time. So its important that we check our blog frequently for any issues. So what all have to be checked?
- Firstly and most importantly check that your blog is loading properly and quickly. Its predicted that if your site takes more time to load, then your visitor will not have to tendency to come back. Remove all unwanted scripts which may slow down your blog.
- Make sure that your blog is compatible in all browsers. Browsershots is a good option to check this. It provides you with a screenshot of your blog in all the browsers and OS. Other than this, you can install popular browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera etc to check the alignment. Most of the time, sidebars are likely to break in different browsers.
- Check all your pages and links, there are chances that you might have liked your pages wrongly. Recently when I added menu to my header, I wrongly liked my contact page to some other page. We all know contact page is a very important page for all blogs. One of my readers pointed it out and I corrected it quickly.
- Another important thing is to check your feeds and Email subscriptions. Make sure that your feed and subscription links are working fine. Also check your feeds are being delivered without any breakage. There is an online resource to check feeds- Feed Validator. This checks if your feed is valid or not and also points out the errors in your feed. I had issues in my feed when I used ‘&’ sign for Tips and Tricks Category.
- Test the Contact page and comments section to make sure that the emails are delivered and readers are able to comment properly. Since there are lot of plugins to customize comments section, there are chances that it may break it.
Another issue I had was the Internet Explorer error and I was able to fix that issue after a bit of research and Googling.
If you like to add up any more points, please share it in comments.
Share & Enjoy
Aug 27th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Thanks Nirmal for such a useful tips
Aug 27th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Very useful tips indeed. I have spiced up my comments section, thanks to your list of plugins.
Do check it out! 
Aug 27th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Nice tips nirmal, often sidebars break out in IE as it doesn’t support CSS well as other browsers do.
Aug 27th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Great tips. I’m working on optimizing my site’s load time.
Aug 27th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Nice tips Nirmal , what do you think should be the optimal loading time of a blog ?
Aug 27th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
@Ram,
You are right, Sidebar breaking is quite frequent problem in IE.
@Harris,
Your comments section looks great.
@Madhur,
Its a difficult question, but optimal time I think would be 5-6 seconds.
Aug 27th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
Good points Nirmal. I agree the most with the first point. If a blog takes time to load then I won’t be visiting it much. I had some SU traffic over the past few days(You had it too
). It seems the 50% of SU visitors stay for only 10 secs and if your blog itself takes 10 secs to load, then the visitor will just go to some other site. So make sure that your blogs load fast. 
Aug 27th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
@Ram,
Thats a good find. I feel if your site takes more than 10 sec to load, then even normal visitors will not come back.
Aug 28th, 2007 at 1:07 am
Nice one there. These are the things which will help all the bloggers. Brian of copyblogger once faced a problem where his contact page wasn’t working properly! Even a blogger of his caliber faced the problem from these small things..I think everyone should run these tests frequently!
Aug 28th, 2007 at 7:04 am
again, another inspiring post! Thanks for your hard work. I never my page links before. I should start checking it now! any good resource for checking broken links?
Aug 30th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Right now i am facing problem with I.E 6 …there’s some overflow of header..and i doesn’t have slightest idea why it might be like that. Nirmal plz check if you can suggest me what may be triggering that overflow.
Aug 30th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
@Ken Xu,
I’m not aware of any resource to check broken links.
@Shashank,
I’ll check your blog in IE and let you know if I can fix that issue.
Aug 30th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
do let me know when you have checked.
Aug 31st, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Really amazing point raised Nirmal, I use site24×7 to track my site downtimes and my server’s issue check function for any other issues!
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