Friday Link Wrapup – Decluttering, CloudFlare, Blogging Plugins, Lazy Loading Images

This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Is your WordPress site looking a bit cluttered? WordPress makes it easy to add lots of different kinds of content – but at some point, enough is enough (besides being harder to comprehend, too much stuff can impact performance). Here’s a quick guide for decluttering your WordPress site, making it lean, mean, and to the point for your visitors.

Recently I did a performance audit for a client and one of my recommendations was to get a CDN (content delivery network). Basically, a CDN can help speed up page load times by serving static content like images from a location nearer the user. CloudFlare is a popular CDN for WordPress that has a free service level – here’s a guide to setting up CloudFlare for WordPress. CloudFlare can also give your site a bit more security as it acts as a filtering proxy between the user and the website.

Here’s a list of top ten plugins for serious bloggers. My favorite from this list is Editorial Calendar, which is especially useful for multi-author blogs.

Finally – back to performance. If your WordPress site is slow and you’ve done the recommended fixes you got from GT Metrix or other services, you might try lazy-loading your site’s images. This means that images won’t load until the user scrolls to that part of a page. Here are some plugins for lazy loading images.