I have written previous articles on using WordPress blogs to drive traffic to dating sites. I recently started to focus on one of my blogs that I hadn’t had time to pay much attention to recently, and wasn’t particularly performing, but Dating Personals Directory is now showing signs of growth in terms of traffic to the blog and traffic to my dating sites.

There are two aspects that I have focussed on in particular and I will share them with you now, in the hope that the same can work for you. The first aspect is to focus on some key elements of the blog’s performance. The second will focus on sharing blog content with Google+ communities.
This analysis is courtesy of the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress which integrates site performance stats from Google Analytics directly onto your WordPress blog dashboard:
Google Analytics gives invaluable insights into a site’s performance and is a good starting point. One area of site performance to keep a close eye on is site speed, which is a known factor in Google’s algorithm. Check the site speed average for your site and also look at individual pages. Some pages can load incredibly slowly and drive up the average site speed for your whole site.
What Are Common WordPress Issues?
Common problems with WordPress blog site speed are caused by some plugins which actually increase the loading time of a blog. The only effective way of checking which of them have an impact on a site is to switch them all off, check the site speed without them, then load them back one by one, checking site speed each time. If there is a plugin causing an issue, it will be easily noticeable, so switch it off, find an alternative if you really need the features the plugin was offering and do the same reload test to check the plugin’s effect on your site.
There are also plugins that will help to improve your site speed, especially cache and minify plugins, as well as image compression plugins which will automatically optimise images and reduce them in size when you upload them. The other big “No No” is not to upload videos into your blog posts and try to run them from your own server. Use YouTube or Vimeo and the inbuilt WordPress features or specialist video plugins to embed a code snippet which will run them from the respective video hosts.
Google Analytics will also highlight any pages or posts that are loading slowly and which can affect overall site loading times. Check out the top ten or twenty posts, identify any that are loading slowly (in my experience some individual posts, which I had not suspected, were loading ten times slower than the rest). Check the content on each to sort the problem, which could be a rogue image that hasn’t been compressed for example.
A useful analysis tool is provided by Google itself, called PageSpeed Insights, which you can access in Google Webmaster Tools, under “Other Resources”.
Type in your website URL and check the site’s loading speed and the user experience scores. More importantly, check the “Fix Recommendations”. The test is run for both mobile and desktop versions of the site. The insight can be revealing and show up key differences between the two.
Running a review of my Online Dating WordPress blog DatingPersonalsDirectory.com, the test shows a difference in site speed between the mobile and desktop versions, of 63% (considered poor) and 75% (considered acceptable) respectively. Using the suggested recommendations, fix the problem, publish and rerun the test. I’ll share my results in a future blog post.
In Summary
• If you work with WordPress blogs, check your site speed using Google Analytics
• Check individual site pages for loading speed and review / rewrite / trash any that are dragging down the site’s speed.
• Switch off plugins and add them back one by one to identify which are affecting site speed.
• Use cache and image management plugins to reduce site speed.
• Don’t load video directly into posts or dating sites, host them on a platform like YouTube and use a video management plugin to insert the code snippet into posts and pages.
Good luck!