What to Do When Your Lifestyle Blog Needs a Lift

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It happens all the time. You finally get that new car you’ve been dreaming of, only to discover that maintaining it is a real drag. The new relationship you’ve been longing for? Yeah. That got stale after months of having to watch (and re-watch) all his favorite Sylvester Stallone movies. The same holds true for your lifestyle blog. It may have been giving you life a few years back, but suddenly, it feels like it’s draining you of all joy. Or maybe it’s just meh.

Well, tell your old blog blues to take a hike. We’ve got some tips that’ll get your lifestyle blog off life support.

Touch base with your blogging goals

As with all things, once you’ve gotten good at blogging, it’s easy to slip into auto-pilot mode. If the idea of writing one more month of blog posts makes you want to weep (not tears of joy), maybe it’s time to re-imagine what you’re doing with your blog.

Take some time to assess what you’ve already accomplished with your blog, and then think about what you want to achieve moving forward. It’s possible that you’ve prematurely smashed all of your original goals, and you just need to raise the bar now. If that’s the case, your biggest problem is how awesome you are. That’s a good problem to have.

Experiment with your brand basics

I know at least one blogger who has been making barely perceptible changes to her brand basics for five years in a row. Over time, she’s developed a clearer idea of what she wants her brand to feel like, and adjusting her brand basics to better reflect that idea prevents her from falling into a rut.

While I wouldn’t recommend making major changes to an established brand, a few tweaks can freshen up the look and feel of your blog while keeping the main elements consistent. If your logo was developed on the back of a napkin five years ago when you weren’t sure the blog would pay off, maybe it’s time to have a designer update it for a more professional look. If you’ve never established your brand basics, there’s no time like the present.

Update your blog design

Website design standards are constantly changing as are the expectations of site visitors. Remember when the hamburger menu created confusion and chaos? Now, it’s the norm. Remember flashing rainbow cursors? I hope not, but if you do, you get my point.

If your blog is over two years old, consider refreshing the design to ensure it integrates best practices and an intuitive interface for visitors. If a custom web reset is out of your budget, a pre-made theme can go a long way towards giving your blog a fresh new design without the staggering price tag.

Add some pizazz with new interactive embellishments

Web designs aren’t the only things evolving. Every day a new slew of plugins and schemas are released into the market, and these little gems can add serious functionality to lifestyle blogs. Stylish optin forms make it easier to grow your email list. Fun features like Shopstyle Collective’s Shop the Post-style widget are fashionable and profitable additions. Recipe cards can be updated with rich schemas that make your blog look good even when it’s just a thumbnail on a search engine results page.

Get rid of clunky junk that gums up the works

Finally, if you did go with a pre-made theme or if it’s been years since your blog has had any maintenance done to it, there’s a chance that your frustration is a result of (totally justified) impatience. Pre-made themes are designed to be functional for any and all users, which means they come equipped with lots of plugins that you probably don’t need. Add a backlog of updates that haven’t been run, and you’ve got a recipe for slower load times and other blog shenanigans.

Sometimes feeling better about your blog is a simple matter of spring cleaning. Get in there and poke around. Look for long overdue updates and plugins that aren’t being used. If you’re worried that you’ll make matters worse, reach out to a tech savvy friend or to a professional for help. As it happens, that’s one of the things that we do best at OnceCoupled, and we’re always eager to help mavens breathe new life into their blogs.