How to Revive your Dying Blog?

If you have tried your hand at blogging, I am sure you know how difficult it can be to maintain a blog and increase the traffic.

Due to this, many times people give up on their blogging journey just because they are not able to give enough time or resource to their blog. Of course, when you begin your journey you have the ultimate driving force called motivation but eventually when you get to learn more about the work, time and energy that you have to put in to make it work, hits the reality pretty hard.

Most of the people consider blogging as a notebook. You have to write regularly and that is it. Nothing less, nothing more. While in reality, it is a lot more than that.

You need to give in a lot more time and take care of a lot more things such as Google ranking, social media marketing, monetizing and what not.

Due to this, many people abandon their dream of becoming a blogger and leaves the blogging chapter behind. While it cannot be confirmed why people leave blogging, it can definitely be boiled down to some of the reasons such as not enough time, not enough resources, or not enough knowledge.

No matter what the reason is, the moment you stop working on your blog. It begins to die.

Can a blog die?

Well, for starters, a blog is like a plant. You lay the seed and start nurturing it.  It grows to become a sapling and with continuous efforts, it eventually becomes a flowering tree. One thing to note here is the words “continuous efforts”. That is the key to keep a blog alive.

Just like when you stop watering your plant, it begins to die, when you stop giving time and efforts to your blog, it begins to die while showing a downward trend. This downward performance of a blog can be considered a slow death of your blog.

How to tell if your blog is dying?

It is not very hard to tell if your blog’s performance is declining. There are many ways by which you can predict the trend of your blog. The best and the sure shot way to do this is by the Google Analytics. This tool once enabled can tell all the stats that you need to see how your blog is doing. Visitors, live visitors, traffic sources etc. can be easily be seen from Google Analytics. The tool also gives graphs which helps in easy understanding the trend of the blog.

If you do not know how to work with Google Analytics, you can use other signals too. You can see the engagement your blog is getting, for example, the number of comments on your blog as compared to what you used to get before, social signals of your post, etc.

And if you aren’t sure how to do any of these, the best and the easiest way to do this is by answering this question “When was the last time you worked on the blog?”

If you are taking your time to recall the date, I would say your blog has already begun to die and it would be wise to make sure it does not die out completely.

How to Revive a Dying Blog?

As I said before, blogs are like plants. If they begin to die, it is best to act quickly and look into the matter and determining the reason for the same. A dying plant can be revived by watering it or repotting it and one can only determine the reason for it once they examine the plant. Only then they can determine the reason for the declined plant’s health.

Just like it, you will need to examine your blog and need to find the reason for the declining performance of your blog.

So, let’s dive in and see how you can improve your dying blog’s performance.

1) Update Your Content

The first thing that anyone should look into when they plan on reviving their dying blog is by updating their existing content.

The reason this works is that when you have a user base and wants to maximize it, one of the most important things for this is having updated content on your website.

If you want a user to stay, the best way to do so is to serve them updated and fresh content in the first place. If the user sees or lands on a page or a blog which does not have accurate or updated information, then user automatically creates a bad impression of the blog and most probably looks for an alternative for the blog and do not trust the blog’s information.

What to update?

Here is a checklist for possible things that you want to have a look and things that you would want to do.

• Start by reading the blog from the beginning just like a user would read. This will give you an idea regarding the opener of the blog. Is the blog able to hook in the reader to read more or not?
• Check on the data that has numbers that need to be confirmed once again if they are correct or not.
• Check on the text and opinions that no longer reflects your views. Change the text which does not have any base or anything to back it up anymore.
• Update the outdated things. Multiple times this happens with tech bloggers that they wrote a review of a product and now a new version of the software is here, and that makes the old version’s steps are of no longer use. This happens the most with tutorials related to software as if a new version arrives of the product with an updated UI, it will render the old process of not much use. In this case, it is wise to update the blogs as per the new UI.
• Images and screenshots which are no longer correct anymore should be removed and updated images should be uploaded in their place.
• The bloggers should also check if the blog is able to resonate with the reader and if not, they can try changing it.

2) Rework the Keywords

considering that you have been blogging for quite some time, I am sure you know how important keywords are for SEO. If you don’t know what keywords are, think fo them as words and phrases that will help you get the relevant traffic and the intended audience on your blog pages.

Keywords have a huge role in bringing traffic to your blog. If your targeted audience is not able to find your page, there is no point of writing a perfect article as there will be no one to read it. That’s not what you want, right?

So, to make sure that does not happen, go ahead and give some time to keyword research and make sure do this before revamping your content so that you can stuff in some keywords while you are updating your blogs.

Another way is to check your stellar articles, the ones which are getting most engagement and see what is the reason behind their impeccable performance. If you will look closely, you will be able to identify the keywords in the article. See if these keywords can be placed in other blogs as well or not and place them accordingly.

Also, while working with keywords, do keep in mind not to overstuff the keywords on the blogs. Doing this will give a negative signal to the search engines in terms of SEO and spamming is something you do not want to do.

3) Fix or Remove Broken Links

When we start blogging, many times we add links to other blogs or outbound links that were relevant at that time. But sometimes these links are changed or removed and this results in breaking the link we have added to our content or blogs.

Not only this is bad for the user reading the content, but it also affects the SEO of the website and ends up in bringing the web results in down in SERPs and that is something we do not want to do.

You can use a plugin like the broken link checker to determine what all links are broken on your website and this tool is available totally free for use.

While you are doing it, also check the context of the links. Are those links still relevant and is the content of the page same as of what it was when you linked the website? Check all these things and make the necessary changes there.

4) Increase Readability of Your Posts

There is a very good chance that when you start writing your posts, you were not much aware of readability and spacing between paragraphs and sentences. Due to this, many of your earlier blogs are mostly chunky and all in all big paragraphs which does not have good readability at all.

You need to fix this as well. While you are updating your content, make sure you are paying attention to the readability of the blogs. Also, give it a read as a naive reader would do and not like the author who already knows the content already.

Make it reader-friendly by breaking down huge paragraphs into smaller ones and maintain the flow of the topic without adding unnecessary breaks in your text.

Another way to increase the readability is by adding variations to your posts. To put more emphasis on some words, bold certain letters. Change the Heading styling and maintain the Heading 1, 2, 3… hierarchy of the titles. You can underline some text if you want and you can add some important information in pull quotes. This will improve the overall readability of the post.

5) Beautify Your Website Layout

One of the best ways to revitalize your website is by working on the website’s design. If the blog is dying, it is wise to revamp the whole website design and change the layout. You would want to lose the old layout and apply the new one.

The layout is not only responsible for the user experience but also the SEO of the website. If your website is well structured and uses all the good faith rules that comply with search engines then, your website will have a better chance of ranking on search engines.

So, we need to work on the layout but how can one achieve that? 

Some might suggest changing the theme altogether but I believe, it is not much of a wise move and you should refrain from doing that.

Changing the theme is always an option but finding a theme that offers all the requirements that you have is a pretty tough job. Since there are loads and loads of themes out there, settling on a single one is quite a difficult task.

So what to do instead?

What if I told you that you can change the layout of your website as per your wish and you do not even require a WordPress theme to do so? I am sure you would want to try it. Well, you definitely can give this a try by getting the Blog Designer Plugin.

The best part about this is that the plugin comes in 2 variations free and pro. If you want to whip up your website’s design then you can go with the free version and then once you are familiar with the plugin you can upgrade it to the premium version anytime!

You get more than 40 unique blog page templates that you can use with your website’s design. Also, you can take control of your layout and can change every small detail of your template using the blog designer settings.

Unlike a theme, you are not bounded to use a single theme on your website. You can create multiple blog design layouts and can change the look and feel of the layout as per your desire.

There are multiple options under multiple tabs which you can use to change the layout of your template. If you want to know more about Blog Designer, check here.

6) Add a Call to Action

A call to action is not necessary for any blog post but not adding it is like leaving a huge chunk of money on the table. CTAs are great opportunities for you as a blogger to give an action to your blog post.

You can always just stop at the end of your blog but if your blog is dying I would recommend you to add a CTA at the end of the blog. This CTA can be anything of your choice. You need to think of something that your users will be willing to do and remember, this  CTA must be related to your article.

For example, you can’t ask your users to share the article on their social media if the article is about something that does not represent their public image. So, instead of asking for social share, ask the users to leave a comment and write down their views on the topic.

Here are some of the actions that can make up your CTA. You can ask the users to –

• Leave a comment at the end and share their views.
• Share the article on social media
• Read other related posts that you will be linking at the end
• Try out the product or service that you talked about or that you offer.

You can add these CTAs to your older blogs as well so your old articles can have a CTA at the end as well.

7) Update Pages On Your Website

One another thing that you will require to do is to update the pages on your websites as well. You do not have to necessarily change the information. Instead, look for the information that you have put up a long time ago and see if it still have any value or change or shake up the ones that do not have any more value.

Start with your About us page. You must have written something there when you started but it is time to change it up. Since you have been blogging for quite some time, it is wise to say you will have a different position and image from what you have built now. Make sure you convey the same thing when someone comes to your about page and not something you put up years ago.

For the Contact Us page, check out for errors in contact information and the contact forms you have put up there. Check if the forms are functioning properly or not and make the changes accordingly.

Add the privacy policy page if you haven’t done already and this thing can be taken care of with the help of WordPress Privacy Policy Generator. Look it up and you can add a privacy policy in minutes.

Overall, change the design of the pages according to your theme and make sure they look part of your website and not something feels like a totally different page as compared to the overall website.

8) Start Engaging

You have been blogging for some time now but you still see a downfall of performance. One of the reasons for this is that there is no or a very little engagement on your website.

Engagement is your interaction with the users in general. It can be anything from replying to comments to sharing. This is a very important step that many bloggers leave out on. So, instead of abandoning the users, it is time to talk to them.

Start off by replying to your comments. You don’t have to reply to all the comments but do reply as much as you can. Remember, these are the people who took out a minute to tell you what they think of your content. It can be a bad comment or a good comment, do address them and learn from what your readers are talking about you and your articles.

If you want your users to be really engaged, try putting up a quiz. This can keep any user engaged really well and can make them look for more content.

9) Make your Website Lightning Fast

You need to make your website fast and quickly loading as well. Nothing is worse than a slow website. No matter how good looking or high tech your website is if your websites take forever to load, then it is time to change things up a little bit.

Start by analyzing the speed of your website. There are many good tools with which you can do this with and they can actually give your website a score based on the performance they are giving.

Once you have confirmed that you need to work on your website’s speed, it is time to see what is dragging your website down. Start by removing all the bulky plugins that you do not use anyways.

Then you can check if your theme is speed optimized or not and you can try changing the theme as well. I would suggest going with any light theme and using the Blog Designer plugin to design your blog pages.

This way you will have your website speed without negotiating with the design of the website.

10) Start Social Sharing

If you are just blogging and not sharing the blog’s activity on your social media pages, then you are loosing out on a huge chunk of data. If you haven’t done it yet, make social media accounts of your blog and start sharing your posts there.

You don’t know how huge the traffic is when it comes to social media but many times bloggers leave it as it is another unnecessary task on their plate. But the fact is that social media sharing gives you a lot more visitors as many people are on social media and they are willing to read more about a topic that might interest them.

Another thing you need to do is getting back to all the comments and messages that you are getting on your social pages. These pages can be a great engagement point for your users and a good point for you to redirect more traffic on your website.

Keep Experimenting

One thing that you might want to do is not settling on one thing. Make changing things up and experimenting your schedule. Remember there is no perfect web design layout, there is no perfect content and there is no perfect blogger.

They all are building their blogs day by day and that is the only way to do this. If you truly are willing to revitalize your blog, start by making a schedule and be consistent on your blog.

All these points will definitely work for your blog. Make sure you implement them properly and keep posting consistently.

What do you think of the actions listed in this article?

Which point did helped you the most? Share it by commenting it down below!