Yesterday I made a small but significant change to this blog and returned my blog index to the front of this domain.
Over the last few years we have seen many popular blogs move their blog index off their home page and use a landing page instead. This allows them to push products and services more effectively to the page on their website with the most traffic (i.e. the domain root).
Good examples of this are Copyblogger, who promote their products and services on their home page, and Pat Flynn, who pushes people towards his newsletter and promotes his products, blog posts, and podcasts.
I think those blogs made the right decision to move blog posts from the home page, but why did I?
The Return of Blog Posts
For a long time I resisted this move to use take the blog index away as I myself preferred reading blogs with traditional style magazine and blog layouts.
One of the reasons I changed my mind was because I was uploading more videos to YouTube and I wanted to give those videos more exposure. Additionally, I felt sections on this blog, such as guides and webmaster resources, were getting lost in the mix.
I therefore moved the blog to www.kevinmuldoon.com/blog/ and used the home page as an overview page that linked to all main areas of this website.
This week I have been optimising this website and removing WordPress plugins that were causing problems.
One of the plugins that was causing problems was Yottie.
This plugin allows me to display the latest videos from my YouTube channels in a professional manner. You can see the plugin in action on my YouTube page.
Yottie is a fantastic plugin, but it can really hurt the performance of the pages it is displayed on. A huge number of the website speed tests I performed highlighted that this plugin was a big problem. By removing the plugin from the home page and other key pages, their performance score jumped up significantly in an instant.
With my YouTube videos no longer being promoted on the home page, I felt that there was less reason to display a landing page on the home page.
I therefore decided to display the blog index on the root of this domain again.
Whilst I do offer a lot of other content on this website, my blog articles remain the main focus. Placing my latest articles front and centre therefore saves most people an extra step.
Final Thoughts
I started this blog post by saying that I made a small but significant change to this website. I truly believe that to be true.
This move was about controlling the flow of traffic on my website. It was about placing my blog articles at the forefront once more.
This should hopefully stop people from clicking on the back button when they reach my home page and increase the number of people who read my blog posts.
Where do you place your blog index on your domain?
Kevin