A sidebar is “a short, often boxed auxiliary news story that is printed alongside a longer article and that typically presents additional, contrasting, or late-breaking news.” Over the past several years, with the growth of blogs, people have come to accept blogs for their often cluttered, overly used sidebars. Sidebars today are used primarily for ads, linking to popular pages, and other sites or articles. Using your sidebar for presenting too much unnecessary information usually causes adverse effects on your readership – due in part to page loading speed, appearance, and other factors.
Most new bloggers load up their sidebar with link directory and rating buttons, barely even organizing them, leading to a page that takes more time to load than the reader takes to leave.
1.) Increase your page loading speed
Slow and long-loading pages lead to a decrease in the rate of return from visitors. Check your page using the Pingdom full page test to find slow loading images, broken files, or ways to optimize your sidebar images.
2.) You may increase in search rankings
Decrease the number of links in your sidebar – move your blogroll or other link lists to their own dedicated pages, and perhaps you’ll see an increase in rankings. Search engine algorithms rank pages higher when there are less links or more higher-ranking, quality links. The increase in crawl speed will likely benefit you, too.
3.) Maybe you’ll save money
Even fifty of those little buttons/chicklets on your blog (if you host them yourself to load the page more consistently) add up if you happen to receive thousands of page views each month. By cleaning up your sidebar, you’ll see a reduction in overall bandwidth and you’ll have more left for using images effectively in your content area – where they belong.
4.) Your blog will look better
Cluttered sidebars on blogs look awful. Readers are immediately distracted from your content if your sidebar lacks any quality links or content. Even the lowest quality blog theme might look good without the long lists of scrambled links and images.
5.) Ad earnings and sponsors might increase
Advertisers are looking for bloggers who can effectively manage their blog and put time into styling it for better returns. Style your sidebars so that they feature advertisers – not thirty rating buttons that’ll get you five visitors. Plus, if you use CSS padding or HTML tables to separate image ads, your sidebar will serve for dual purposes – revenue and content.
6.) Those widgets don’t help you in the short term or future
You have a blog about personal finance or some other topic that interests you deeply and you are devoted to. Don’t include game, joke, media, music, news (not related), or any other type of “personal” widgets. They don’t help your readers – they just show them that you care more about filling up your sidebar with junk. If you really like a widget that is personal-oriented, start a new blog. Purchase a new domain or register a Blogspot/WordPress.com blog and blog on it as your personal blog.
7 + 8.) Readers hate unrelated [and uncapitalized] links
Someone (or a bot/spammer) contacted you to post a link on your site, perhaps in your blog roll, that was completely irrelevant to the topic of your blog. You immediately said yes as it was the first person that had actually contacted you, and placed their link in the sidebar. The link is not only impertinent to your blog, taking up valuable space, but probably wasn’t even styled right. One of the biggest turn-offs for readers is seeing links that look like “tHiS is mY lInk “. Take a few seconds to hit the SHIFT key and use proper capitalization.
9.) Content will be of a higher importance
Take your focus of adding every widget you find to your sidebar. Instead, take the time to add value to your site. Your readership will increase, you’ll be less worried about the number of ratings you blog received, plus you’ll see more visitors.
10.) Visitors will take you more professionally
Blogging is real business, even if you are doing it for fun. If you do something that angers others, you’ll have to face the consequences. Blog design doesn’t stop with choosing a theme. It involves customizing, optimizing, and enhancing it every day to drive results.
Bloggers need to realize the huge importance of sidebars. They were meant to be used for navigation and content – NOT clutter. Plan what is really important and what isn’t – create a list of elements that are absolutely necessary – internal linking, ads, blogroll, tags/categories, and widgets, in order of importance.
From the list, unclutter, organize, remove, or move the ones that you feel are unnecessary. Some ideas to get you started:
Move the blogroll, tag cloud, or any other list of links to their own dedicated page. Use asides (WordPress ) to display short thoughts on things you found interesting or think others should know. Keep the number of social bookmark widgets/links to a minimum – only add the top ones – Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, as most users rely solely on them. Don’t add multiple subscription options – choose one method, or use the FeedBurner page to better accommodate readers. Add a “subscribe via email” box if necessary. Your goal is to attract readers, so keep this area near the top of the page. Make sure that you have a search box near the top of the page or in the header. Allow 5-10 bloggers to link to you in your sidebar, then either: a) stop linking to other blogs via the sidebar, or b) add a link at the bottom to a page for links. Find directories that don’t require a reciprocal link, or place the links in a separate “resources” or “directory” page. Style your ads more effectively. Find better widgets – ones that combine several into one. Don’t list recent posts – they’re already displayed on your main page. Add navigation links – home, contact, advertise, about, etc. to the header instead of the sidebar. Place not as important/traffic metering links towards the bottom of the sidebar or in the footer. Get rid of those long tag clouds and categories list – clean them up and combine them into more broad categories. Most people can combine them effectively into twenty or so. Browse for a better theme with two sidebars and a better ability to separate sidebar areas. Reward frequent commentators, but perhaps not in the sidebar. What are your thoughts on adding content to the sidebar? Where does the line end between functionality and unnecessary?
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[...] This is pet peeve of mine. Site wide outbound links. Sites that have all kinds of outbound links off the header, huge sidebars with categories and pages and blog rolls a mile long. The minute you install wordpress you have a bunch of sitwaide links in your sidebar, blogroll and footer. Most themes will have at least one outbound link in the footer. All these outbound links are not only unnecessarily but they are leaking page rank they could Declutter your Sidebar What’s Really Necessary in Your Sidebar Reasons and Ways to Clean Up Your Sidebar [...]