Wordpress has become one of the most popular blogging platforms and a large part of that reason is the sheer number of plugins available to add to blogs. But many of these plugins, especially when combined with an obsessive amount of advertisements, tend to overwhelm readers with an abundance of clutter in both the sidebar and at the end of the posts themselves. So it is worth considering if you really need all the extras you have on your blog or if you can do some spring cleaning to provide a cleaner experience for your readers.

Wonderful World of Widgets
Do your readers really need to know what your Alexa rank is, that Akismet has blocked a zillion spam comments or that you only have a Google PageRank of 2? Do they need to see that your blog entry has 627 words and will take about a minute and a half to read? Nope, not really. These things all just add to the cluttered look of your blog. Only add widgets that either benefit you (such as including a Twitter box in the sidebar to increase your Twitter followers) or are useful to your visitors (such as easy submissions to social media sites). Be ruthless and ditch everything else.

Speed
Even more annoying that the overwhelming feeling that a ton of clutter on the sidebar can cause, is when that clutter starts slowing down the load time of your blog, or worse, completely hangs it while waiting for a third party something to load. You absolutely do not want to sacrifice your load speed just to add some widget to your blog. And this is especially true when you have gone overboard adding widgets and plugins and they are all taking up critical load time that results in your readers wondering what is taking so long and leaving your blog for a competitor’s blog instead. So when you are de-cluttering your blog, pay special attention to what slows down the load time, and give those the axe first.

Advertising
First, look and see which ads are actually making you money. If you have AdSense in the sidebar but it has earned you a measly $1.86 in the past three months, odds are pretty good that you won’t miss that money and can remove it from the sidebar. But has it made you $50 in the past two weeks? If so, then you will want to keep it around. Any ads that run for a month without making you a worthwhile amount of money should be removed entirely or replaced with something that could potentially be more profitable. This especially applies to those cheesy super-animated affiliate ads that involve hitting a monkey or that feature a fake Windows alert box or for in-line advertising that shows a pop-up when you mouse over it.

Move around
Do you need to have a link to your privacy policy page linked at the top of your sidebar? Not really, especially when you can easily relocate it well below the fold to your footer. If you absolutely need to have something in the sidebar, add it to the bottom (below the fold) so you can feature the more useful content above.

RSS feed options
Do you offer convenience buttons to multiple different blog subscribing services? Either use one of the plugins that offers an all-in-one version, or add all the various buttons on a separate page, while offering the standard RSS feed on the main page. If you discover a high portion of your subscribers are using one service, consider adding that second button to the main page, but otherwise, relegate all those extra service buttons to a “RSS Subscribe Options” page.

When you declutter your content, it is important to remember that you don’t need to offer everything to everyone. Just because your mom visits your blog doesn’t mean you need to add a weather widget just so she can see what the weather is like in your town at the moment. You want to offer only what the majority of your visitors want and need, and most of them don’t want to see eighteen widgets, plugins and flashing things in your sidebar… most will happily handle a few, since it is a blog, but the goal is to not overwhelm them with so much that they hit the back button for a hasty retreat, which some blogs definitely have done for me!

Is the pack rat in you resisting the need to remove some of your widgets and plugins? Just deactivate the plugins in your Wordpress control panel, and if you discover visitors really miss them, you can always reactivate them later. Same with widgets… just save the ones you remove and you can add them again later if you need to. But seriously, chances are pretty good that no one will ever miss them, except maybe you!