Last time, in WordPress on Steroids Pt. 1, I expressed the important of accommodating users who were accessing your website via a mobile browser. Now, let’s make the experience better for all of your users.
WordPress Optimization
Optimizing your website now prepares you for an influx of traffic in the future, as well as just making things run smoother (not to mention faster) in general. Optimization is an ongoing process that never really stops, but you can do one thing immediately, and that is to start using caching.
DB Cache is a caching engine that stores database query results as opposed to html output, resulting in less space on the disk that is taken up for cache storage. Your visitors always get real information while keeping CPU use to a minimum.
Leveraging Scheduled Posts
Most blog authors use the scheduled post feature to pre-load content into WordPress to be displayed at a future date. Why not build reader anticipation and generate hype for posts you’ve already scheduled? Well, it’s easy, with this little snippet. You can place it anywhere in your template files, or create an HTML Widget and place it in there.
$show = 5;
$q = new WP_Query('post_status=future&order=DESC&showposts=' . $show);
if ($q->have_posts()) {
echo "<ul>\r\n";
while ($q->have_posts()) : $q->the_post();
echo "<li>";
the_title();
echo "</li>\r\n";
endwhile;
echo "</ul>\r\n";
}
Expose ALL Content to Readers & Search Engines
It’s very common to see a “Most Popular Posts” or “Featured Posts” widget on a blog, and yes, they are effective. However, this draws the reader to a very specific point in your site’s workflow, and this point is at the very end of the user experience. Why not highlight all of your content equally? You can do so by showing off random posts from your archive in your sidebar, with the Random Posts Widget. Who knows? You might have more diamonds in the rough than you think, and you could get your user stuck in an infinite loop!
