What I am about to share to you may be an oldie approach to optimizing your WordPress blog, but taking it for granted could greatly affect the performance of your blog- de-clutter your sidebar! Bloggers cannot avoid taking on new projects, widgets, and promotions over a year and throws all of them in the sidebar where they get out of control.
The solution, de-cluttering.
Here are what you have to focus on when de-cluttering: Outdated materials: Check if the ads, promotion, and contest you have on your sidebar are still legitimate.
Outdated links: Check the links on your blog roll and see if they are still active.
Your blog roll may already be built-up with inactive links.
Too many links: If you can no longer manage the number of links on your blog roll, maybe you can start limiting or rotating the links that you show on your blog roll.
Try providing a page just for the list of your links.
To do that, you can change your links display code with wp_list_bookmarks ('orderby=rand&limit=10').
With that, your links can be randomly shown in batches of ten.
Another thing to consider when de-cluttering is to set your sidebar priority.
Place on top those that you want to achieve the most attention, as well as the essential and time sensitive ones.
You should also try to look if the information you have on your sidebar will be beneficial to your blog visitors or you just placed it there because you find it cute.
Not that I am against cutesy, but it may be consuming precious screen real estate.
So the next time you decide on putting something in your sidebar, consider that it should be something that serves a purpose to yourself and your blog visitors.
Ask the question, "What purpose would this serve me and my readers?" That WordPress optimization technique is simple but could do wonders to your WordPress blog performance.
But that is just one of the many ways you could do to optimize your blog and eventually drive more traffic your site.