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We at BlogConduit.com want to take time to remember the reason we can do what we do. There are thousands of brave, selfless men and women who are serving our country today so that we at home can enjoy the richness and blessings of freedom and liberty. We remember those who gave the ultimate sacrifice so that we would not have to.

Our hopes, prayers and thanks go out to the military members and their families and declare to you that we DO appreciate the service and sacrifice.

Blogging and deriving financial and social profits would not be possible without the protection and defense of the United States of America!

One of our recent posts covered the topic of reducing the number of plug-ins a blogger might install on their WordPress site. I received a couple of emails asking why statistics plug-ins like Wp-Stats or Stat Counter weren’t included in the list of necessary plug-ins. We do apologize for forgetting to mention these, but will explain why they were left off the list.

Quite frankly, these kinds of plug-ins have long been considered by us to be simply distracting and unnecessary. Most of us usually install some kind of “real-time” stat tracking plug-in when we first go live with our site. With few exceptions, most people then turn to the stats every 10, 20 or 60 minutes and continually refresh their page to see how many visits they are getting. Take our word for it, you are wasting your time, and the time of your visitors.

At first glance it may seem like this one little plug-in wouldn’t slow down a site, but if the object is to make the site load as fast as possible, then the answer is to reduce your plug-ins to the bare minimum you may need. Stats programs are unnecessary for two reasons:

1) Rather than relying on stats programs, most advertisers and businesses rely heavily on the reporting provided by Google. Page Ranks are assigned by Google, the majority of searches are done on Google, and a big part of Google’s job of indexing content involves their statistical engines. Instead of installing local stats programs, just go to Google Analytics and install their tracking code. Yes, you may have to wait a whole day to find out how many visits you received, but that will free up a large amount of time to actually write quality content. Stop worrying about your visitors and create content they want.

2) Local statistical reports are usually not very accurate. If you won’t take our word for it, do a simple experiment…install all the stat programs you can find and let them suck up your bandwidth for a few days. Go back to each stat report and you will see different results, probably in every single case.

The idea is simple…let someone else do the work and worry for you. Free yourself from statistic frenzy and concentrate instead on your content. You will be rewarded with the result.

So your WordPress isntallation is complete and you have a fabulous looking theme for your blog. Now what? Plug-ins of course! But before you go out searching for these fabulous and primarily free toys, take a few minutes to review some of our suggestions.

One of the first mistakes made by many of those new to WordPress is to go directly to the WordPress Plugin site and begin downloading and installing plug-in after glorious plug-in. Hey, we know it’s fun and we’re all guilty of it. Let’s take just a few minutes though to slow down and consider what we’re doing.

One of the first rules of webmastering is to reduce page load time. If you’ve searched around the web long enough, it’s highly likely that you’ve encountered websites that seem to take an excruciatingly long time to load. If you’re like most of the web surfing public, you no doubt didn’t sit there and wait for the page to load, did you? NO! You left that site after about 10 seconds and went somewhere else. If you load up too many plug-ins, your page load speed may be very negatively affected and we speed demons will pass right by your page.

Tools and gadgets are fun, but the vast majority of web surfers are looking for information. A site filled with gadgetry and intrusive buttons or graphics will distract the reader and they will depart, probably never to return again. So what do you do? We’re glad you asked! Basically a good blog needs a few core components (besides excellent content).

Get Noticed!

You want search engines to find your blog so that they can list you in their search results. Two popular plugins for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are Platinum SEO Pack and the All in One SEO Pack. Of course there are premium plugins that do maybe just a little better job, but these two are tops on our list.

No More Spam!

One of the first things a webmaster will want to do is reduce the amount of spam they receive. Complete spam eradication is nearly impossible, but it can be drastically reduced. There are several good spam protection plugins out there, but we have found that Akismet works pretty darn good.

Archives

You won’t want to display every article you ever wrote on the first page, but you will want your older content to continue receiving page views. One way to present older articles is through the use of archives. Once again, there are many great archive options available, but on BlogConduit.com, we use the free Collapsible Archives plugin.

Meet People!

Providing valuable information to your readers is the number one job of a blogger, but information can (and should) flow both ways. You will want some kind of contact interface so that readers can contact you with valuable feedback or even sales contacts. Contact Form 7 is a tried and trusted platform that we use regularly.

The above mentioned plugins are what we consider to be the bare-bones essentials for blogs. Over the coming weeks and months we will discuss various other plugins associated with particular applications, but for now, simply remember that every widget, plugin and code that you add to your site will affect page load time in some way or another. Keep your site slim and trim and more people will enjoy their visit to your blog.