Why Less Is More With Third Party Widgets On Your Food Blog
We have all done this at some point or the other as a blogger. Overused widgets and plugins. Cluttered our blogs with social media buttons and random lists on the side panels. Especially if you are a new blogger, you feel the need to eliminate all the white space with badges, plugins and widgets.
But do these widgets serve any purpose, or are they simply fancy additions that are only slowing down your website?
Yes and no.
To assess this, we have to first differentiate between the two popular kinds of widgets seen on most food blogs. These can broadly be divided into social media share buttons, and other badges and fan/follower pages.
Social sharing
While most savvy browsers have some form of plugin on their own browsers to share their favorite content like a Pinterest Button or a Delicious plugin, it is still too early to discard social media share buttons entirely from one’s blog, especially in the early stages. But there is no reason to go overboard with it.
Look at what happened when I turned on all the social media sharing buttons,
It’s highly unappealing and seems a bit desperate, to be honest. A better approach might be to simply give a nudge to someone to share your content, much like the share button used by Medium. When a reader makes a recommendation, there is a slight nudge to also share that content, without appearing too overwhelming.
Most of these widgets are not very mobile friendly and most browsers now offer more native and seamless sharing options from the devices. This is more consistently placed than third party plugins that are often not updated or are just plain eyesores. Social sharing buttons like this hamper with the responsiveness of the website, and, as a result, the blog can get penalised by Google.
Widgets, Badges and the likes
Now moving onto the other widgets, these are a little bit more redundant than the social media share buttons. Most often we simply add these because they are there or because we saw it on someone else's blog, not realising that they do more harm than good.
Reduces Speed Considerably
Having a lot of widgets on your website can increase the loading time considerably. This in turn causes serious damage to your traffic. People will leave the website out of frustration, increasing bounce rate and SEO is affected. And most often, the reason you have got all these widgets is to increase traffic, so the whole exercise becomes quite pointless.
According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, almost 50% of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn't loaded within 3 seconds.
And with more and more people choosing to view content on their mobiles and tablets, this is getting to be a bigger problem. When you are travelling and want to check out that recipe for White Chocolate Mud Cake, you can’t wait for a page to load for a good minute. You would have moved on to the next option by then.
While it can be argued that most widgets are designed to load in the end, after the main content, since most bloggers manage the widgets by themselves, they may not do it this way out of ignorance, hence affecting the load time.
And maybe this is why Google uses the load time as one of the many metrics to determine how a website is indexed on search results. So longer load times will affect SEO too.
The Effect on Design
The online audience is very discerning when it comes to design. The demand is for a crisp, pleasing and uncluttered design, one that doesn’t interfere with the reading process.
When you start adding all these third party widgets and plugins, there is a definite distraction. Take a look at some of the popular widgets that are seen on blogs:
When you are reading a post on how to make the best Chicken Curry in the world, do you really want to know about the real time visitors to that blog?
This situation aggravates when there are ads too on the website. The visual overload with ads, widgets and images from the post itself can be overwhelming. It can certainly put off a lot of people.
Losing Traffic
Another big problem that one can face is losing your own visitors to other websites. For instance, when someone sees your Facebook Page widget, and they click through to that, it is highly unlikely they will come back to your blog. The content on the website you have taken them to will be too distracting.
Similarly with your FoodGawker gallery. And TasteSpotting and so on.
So a valuable visitor you have made on your blog, is redirected to another website because of a widget you have added.
This is precious traffic and revenue you are losing out on, if you have monetised.
Facebook Likes are An Illusion
One of the most popular widgets is the Facebook Page Like Widget.
Like the description, originally the purpose for having this was to increase the number of people subscribing to your blog’s page on Facebook. That would mean once someone clicked on the like button on the widget they would then get access to all your subsequent posts on the page. While this was the case before, now Facebook has stopped promoting posts or pages based simply on the number of likes they are getting. Ever since Facebook started their paid promotions, this is pretty much the only way to get your posts seen.
Once we started posting on our Facebook page, we were shocked, shocked, to see that not all the users that liked our page were seeing our posts. For example, with over 6,000 likes on our page, a typical post would only be seen by fifty to several hundred people. _ Elan Dekel of Lullubee.com
So even if you were to accumulate 15000 likes on your FB page through this widget you are not increasing your audience substantially. If anything, it serves as an ego boost and nothing else.
Are widgets completely useless? No, they are not.
But they need to enhance the quality of the blog, not slow it down and interrupt the reading process. The best food blogs out there have very few widgets. Of course, they do have a huge reputation, so it can be argued that they may not need many of these widgets, but it is still interesting to note that the best food blogs out there don't use most of these ego strokers.
Look at these two screenshots from Pinch of Yum. They have no social media share buttons. And everything else leads the reader to one of their own pages. There is no traffic loss, no distraction and the design speaks for itself.
The case is similar with the award-winning blogs shown below.
While widgets are certainly helpful in some ways, their use needs to be in moderation. Otherwise, it can definitely affect both the quality of your blog, and the traffic. So use them with caution.
To hear more from the Cucumbertown Team, connect with us. We would love to know what you think!
