Readability
People come to your blog or website to read your content, so make sure they can read it. Some people like to use pretty background pictures that continue behind the text and make the content very hard to read. Use an even background color for your content and make sure your text has sufficient contrast to the background. Font size is another important factor to think about. Too big or too small makes text hard to read.

Video and audio
Video can be a great medium to communicate a message to your website visitors, but it shouldn’t start playing as soon as your page opens. Please let me decide if, and when, I want to press play. The same goes for audio, I don’t need to hear your favorite song playing when I visit your site.

Ads
Some people have more ads than content on their website. Ads should be subtly integrated into your website, if at all. All too often I see sites trying to sell their own product or service and show ads of their competitors. Do you want to sell your own stuff or make your visitors aware of the competition?

Plugins
There are a great number of useful plugins that you can add to your blog. Before adding them all, think about which ones would be useful to your visitors. I don’t care what the weather forecast at you place is. I’m also not likely to be interested in the current moon phase when reading a blog about cars. When adding widgets to your sidebar, try to use static ones. Flashy, animated gifs distract your visitors from the content.

If you don’t agree with the above advice, you are not alone. There’s a huge website with people just like you, it’s called MySpace.

Getting shut down by your hosting provider
The sudden increase of traffic can cause some alarm bells to go of at your hosting provider. Some server administrators will mistake the ridiculously high hits on your site for a DDoS attack and take your site offline.

You can prevent this from happening by letting your hosting provider know that a page from your site made the front page of Digg. This is, of course, providing you know you have been Dugg.

Another reason, your web hosting provider might have, to take your site offline, is that your account has used up it’s available traffic resources. A page with only a few images and scripts can easily add up to a few hundred kb of data being transferred on a single page load.

Looking at my website statistics, it seems that my average page size is about 35 KB. If I would be running on a hosting account with a 10 GB a month data limit, I would be able to serve about 285.000 pages a month. That is plenty for most sites, but being on the front page of Digg can drive crazy amounts of visitors to your site, which can chew up your 10 GB plan in no time.

But there is something that can be far worse than having your site taken offline for reaching the bandwidth limit: it’s having your site stay online after using up your monthly bandwidth and

being presented with a bandwidth over usage bill.
Most hosting providers have ridiculous fees for any bandwidth you use on top of what’s included in your hosting plan. This happened to me last year. One of my dedicated servers used more than the plans bandwidth. The bill I was presented was quite high, but I managed to get the hosting provider to cancel the bill.

Having your site shut down or being billed extra can be easily avoided. In case the billing or shutdown would be caused by exceeding your hosting plans allowed amount of traffic, you can simply make your pages smaller. Avoid over usage of images, as they are the biggest items on any page, byte size wise. The images used on your page could be saved with a little higher compression ratio or you could offload the images to a different hosting account to share the bandwidth load. If you don’t have a second hosting account, you could host the images on a free image hosting site, there are plenty of free ones available to you.

It is also very common to have your hosting account disabled for using to much of the servers resources. This won’t happen on a dedicated server, but if you are on a shared hosting account, they can shut your site down for putting too much stress on the servers processor, which will affect other clients websites hosted on the same server. This too is easy to avoid. Have a look at your WordPress blog. Everything is stored in a database. The blog title, the tagline, the post title, the post text, the categories, the tags and much more.

When a page is requested for viewing, the software will read all the necessary information from the database. Compiling a single page involves running a lot of queries. Your web server is good at running queries and retrieving the needed information from the database at lightning speeds, but there are limits. With a few dozen page requests every second, the server will soon have trouble keeping up. Remember that there can easily be over a hundred other websites running on the same server.

Running all these queries to build a single page is not really necessary though, once the page has been created by the php code, it can be stored as a static html file. The next visitor can be presented with the html output directly, which probably uses at least 90% less processing power. Don’t worry if this sounds a bit too technical to you, there is an easy way to implement this method in your WordPress blog, its called caching and there is a nice plugin available: WP Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh

Don’t wait implementing these until you hit the front page of Digg. Once you are on the page, there will not be much you can do. These measures should be in place before the traffic avalanche hits you. Even if it never happens, it’s better to be save than sorry. So, be prepared!

Here are some of my favorite plugins:

Akismet
The ultimate comment-spam buster! If I could only use a single plugin, this would be the one. Akismet protects your blog from comment spammers that put links to all sorts of nasty websites in your post comments. Without Akismet you will be spending a lot of time digging thru the spam comments. All you need to do to activate the Akismet plugin is get a free API key from the WordPress site. The plugin itself doesn’t need installing as it comes bundled with the WordPress installation.

All in one SEO pack
WordPress is not fully optimized for the search engines, but that changes after installing the all in one SEO pack. This plugin gives you full control over page titles, meta tags and keywords.

Broken link checker
Whenever you put links into your posts, there is a chance that you will have broken links on your site in the future. This plugin checks all your outgoing links and lets you know if any of them are not working any more.

do-follow
Get rid of the no-follow attribute, because it doesn’t help.

feedburner feedsmith
If you want to be able to track your rss subscriber numbers, I suggest you sign up for a free account at feedburner. Once you have your feedburner account, you’ll need to change your rss feed links to point to the feedburner feed. “Where are the rss feed links located that need changing?” you might ask. That’s where this plugin comes in: install, activate and put your feedburner feed URL in the config screen.

no self pings
This plugin prevents pingbacks from showing when linking back to your own posts.

share this
A nice little button to enable visitors to submit your blog post to various social bookmarking sites or send an e-mail to friends.

top commentators
Say “thank you” to your top commentators by giving them a side wide link.

wordpress automatic upgrade
Upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest release from within the admin panel. Upgrading this way saves a lot of worries and time.

wp-cumulus
A beautiful flash tag-cloud to spice up your blog. This is probably not helping with SEO, but it looks awesome!

There are many more great WordPress plugins available, but these are some that I really like. Oh hold on, I almost forgot to mention the best plugin of them all: my very own ad buttons plugin! Actually, it’s not that great yet, as it is still a work in progress, but feel free to download it and give it a try.

I don’t think I, or anybody else, has the time to give the thousands of plugins available on the WordPress site all a try. Do you know of some particularly good plugins, please let me know!