A blog is a perfect way of engaging online users, an avenue for bloggers to share their knowledge, thoughts, and opinions.

Blogs, when written professionally, can influence decisions, businesses, etc.

There are components, included below, that every blog must have to succeed on the internet.

The utmost aim is to improve the reader’s experience and build a loyal audience.

These components of a blog work together to improve your reader’s experience, establish a devoted audience, and solidify your blogging brand.

Make sure your WordPress blog incorporates these critical components.

1. Structure and design

The best blog structure allows visitors to find their way around easily on their first visit.

Simplicity is key in blog design, if your blog components are all over the place, it’s confusing and strenuous for the human brain to follow.

Many visitors would click away and not come back.

A basic blog has a header, navigation, body of the post, sidebar, and footer.

We recommend you follow this outline on all the pages of your site, of course, aside from landing pages.

For a modern design, however, it is now a trend to leave out the sidebar, and centrally the post content thereby putting the posts in the limelight. As

As much as your blog design will be influenced largely by your niche, you must follow these simple approaches – enough white space, legible fonts, color intensity, etc.

3. Favicon

A favicon is a smaller version of your brand’s logo or other identifying symbols of your brand.

On desktop devices, it shows up in the upper left corner of the browser tab, while on mobile devices, it appears as a little square-shaped image on tab archives and bookmarks.

The favicon strengthens your brand image in that it lets blog readers know they are on the right blog.

4. Security

Blog security is important as there are several hackers on the internet waiting to take advantage of vulnerable sites.

Blogs get a lot of traffic, hackers may desire to redirect your visitors to another website, making you lose a big chunk of your site visitors.

Ensure you install security software to forestall and prevent hackers from gaining access.

Also, the comment section is one of the targets of hackers and spammers.

You can easily prevent this by installing anti-spamming software.

The software will check the comments against possible spam and prevent the blog from publishing the comments.

We recommend you activate comment moderation, this serves as a sieve to filter out bad comments before making them publicly available to your readers.

5. Reverse chronological order

Blogs are designed to show the latest posts first and hence are displayed in reverse chronological order on post archives.

This is to easily access the recent information first, leaving older posts at the back, accessible only at request or via search.

Information is progressive hence, the latest posts should have priority over older posts.

7. Mobile responsive design

The majority of your blog visitors would browse via a mobile device, so it’s imperative to have a mobile responsive blog design.

This means your blog content must respond to and be easily accessed on several screen sizes and devices without having to zoom in or out!

The majority of blog software around the internet is designed to be mobile responsive.

However, there is yet non-responsive software circulating the internet so, ensure to insist on this in your design.

8. Email subscription form

To keep your readers coming back to your blog, an important way is to collate their email addresses and routinely send them the latest posts in their email that drive them back to your blog.

This you can achieve by providing an opt-in form, like the form on the right, for readers to fill in to stay in touch.

Commonly, bloggers include these forms on the sidebar, end of the post, and the footer of their blogs (like ours).

9. Social profile links

To generate traffic to your blog, you must have a presence on the relevant common social media platforms available on the internet.

You can thereafter include your profile links on your blog, for your readers to follow your profiles, access more of your content, and also tag you on the platforms.

You can place these links on the header and footer of all pages and posts of your blog.

10. Social sharing buttons

You want to make it easy for your readers to share your posts on social media, this increases your site visitors and engagement with your post and site in its entirety.

Your blog should have social share buttons active, allowing readers to share your blog content on platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, etc.

You can place these buttons at the top and bottom of all your posts.

Add social sharing to your blog posts using any of the following plugins:

11. Commenting feature

Adding a blog commenting feature to your blog introduces an avenue for your readers to interact with your content, this generates conversations about your posts.

Many blogging applications like WordPress have an inbuilt commenting feature, others include Facebook comments, Disqus etc.

12. Web pages

1. About page

This page tells your story, your and your team’s blogging story – who you are, your interests, the focus of the blog and why you write about them, what you aim to achieve by blogging, etc.

As a blogger, this is where you introduce yourself to your readers.

You can also include a picture of yourself and or your team.

It should reflect the tone of your blog – funny, serious, etc.

2. Advertisement page

There are several ways to make money from your blog.

An important one is via advertisements on your blog.

This page informs prospective brands, influencers, and other entities about your blog’s online recognition and following, as well as why they should collaborate with you.

The aim is to showcase your blog’s value for advertisers to work with you, paying you for having their ads on your blog.

Your Media page could include:

  • Number of monthly visitors to your blog
  • Authority sites you have been featured on
  • Number of email subscribers
  • The number of social media followers.
  • Links to your social media channels
  • Etc.

3. Contact page

This is where your contact details are listed.

As a blogger, your readers would love to get in touch with you.

It is best practice to have a contact form, email address, a map, social profile links, a contact phone number, etc.

If your blog is to take a private tone, just a contact form would suffice, otherwise, you can include your email address and phone number.

A branded or custom email address (e.g. contact@renixconsulting.com) is advised as it is more professional.

The bottom line is to make it easy for your readers to contact us while respecting your privacy.

Did you enjoy this post?

If so, please share it with your friends and followers on social media! It's a great way to help others learn about WordPress and to support our blog. You can use the share buttons below...

FREE QUOTE