The Annoying Practices to Avoid in 2020

Popularly known is the fact that –  every new year comes with giant 'new year resolutions', even if only few of those are kept!

As a blogger, one of your resolve in 2020 should be to give your readers a better user-experience that would make them want to visit again.

Getting your blog readers to be at peace with you is a necessary requirement, if you want to succeed as a professional blogger. This is because when it comes to blogging, engagement matters a lot.

The Annoying Practices to Avoid in 2020

Unknown to many bloggers is the fact – they are chasing many of their loyal readers away with their poor blog design and these annoying practices.

In this post, I will try to highlight some of those things that could possibly piss off your blog readers in 2020.

1. Broken Links

This is the first thing that gets your readers angry. It feels so annoying to hit a link and get the boring 404 Error.

Aside pissing your blog readers off with those broken links, broken links can also result in low page rank on top search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex and the others.

How to Check for Broken Links

Fortunately, there is an online service you can use to validate all the links on your blog. What the service does is to scan through your blog to ascertain if there is a dead link(s) on your blog.

So, to check for broken or dead links on your blog simply visit brokenlinkcheck.com and then, enter the URL of your blog in the box provided. Then hit 'Find Broken Links.'

You should get a complete list of all broken or dead links on your blog. Fix as much as you can or remove the ones that aren't vital to the contents in view.

• 2. Frequent Down-Time
  

This is a known challenge with many self-hosted blogs. Either you are greeted with the annoying  "cloudflare error 503 page" or the extremely embarrassing "time out error".

It is best to remain on the free platforms, if you can't afford a decent host yet. No need to bore your blog readers with epileptic response time from these budget hosting companies.

My single review of Namesilo has stood the test of time, because my readers found their services as valid. So why not create a budget to switch to a valid host, if your website goes down frequently?

There are many free services to monitor your website's down-time. Example of those includes-

• freewebmonitoring.com
• Jetpack website monitor module and
• Pingdom free website monitoring tool.

3. Slow Loading Page

Https or no Https, Valuable content or non-valuable content; a slow loading website would always chase away more visitors than it brings.

There are many great tools online to check and improve website load time for free. One of those is the Google speed insight and the free tool at pingdom.com.

You can avail yourself those and fix the bugs that affects your website load time.

4. Deceptive Download Links

Aside hitting a broken link, no one likes to be deceived. So one sure way to piss off your blog readers is to put a link that makes them believe they are downloading a file, only for them to find out that they have just downloaded perhaps your blog's app or so.

Many entertainment bloggers are guilty of this as they use this deceptive measure to promote ads and illicit media files.

• 5. Misplaced Ad Banners
  

It is true that monetizing your blog is one of the juice of blogging aside the passion. And one way to monetize your blog is by placing advertisements or promotions on your blog.

Ad companies like Adsense would normally provide you with a code that actually generates an ad banner for placement on your blog.

While you may be tempted to think placing ad banners everywhere on your blog will generate more income for you, the truth is that your blog readers hate it when they see ads everywhere and you may lose some ardent readers of your blog as a result of this.

• Our suggestion is usually to have few ads that are well positioned in strategic places for better conversion. You could have some at the side bar and another in between your content.
  

6. Unnecessary or Too Many Re-directions

Using too-many redirection on your blog or website actually does two harm to your site. First, it increases your bounce rate  and secondly, it annoys your readers.

By bounce rate we mean how long people stay on your blog before leaving. Having a high bounce rate actually means that your readers are not spending much time on your blog. You can check your blog's bounce rate using Google Analytics.

Aside resulting in  a high bounce rate, redirecting your blog readers to other sites, such as ad sites can be extremely annoying.

Our suggestion is always to open links in new tab instead of automatically redirecting your readers away to something they may not be interested in.

• 7. Spelling and Grammatical Errors
  

This one is very obvious, no one wants to be bothering their heads trying to figure out the message you are trying to pass across perhaps because your blog content contain loads of errors.

Our recommendation is to always proofread your articles before publishing them. Browsers such as Mozilla Firefox will usually highlight all wrongly spelt words in red and you can get the correct spelling for each word(s) by simply right-clicking on it.

• Conclusively; 
  

You have seen all we have in our list for now. We appreciate relevant questions as well as contributions.
Warmest regards from Obasi Miracle of 3rd Planet Techies. Cheers and happy huge blog engagement in 2020.