These are very easy techniques  to improve the navigation of your blog and visitors will find more blog’s content, which ultimately give your blog more traffic.

Add Breadcrumbs to WordPress Navigation

Navigation trail by using BreadCrumb NavXT Plugin

Breadcrumbs typically appear horizontally across the top of a web page, usually below title bars or headers. They provide links back to each previous page the user navigated through to get to the current page or—in hierarchical site structures—the parent pages of the current one. Breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting or entry point. A greater-than sign (>) often serves as hierarchy separator, although designers may use other glyphs (such as » or ›), as well as various graphical treatments.

Typical breadcrumbs look like this:
Home page > Section page > Subsection page or Home page >> Section page >> Subsection page

Read  detail about Breadcrumbs to WordPress Navigation

Smart Breadcrumbs – WordPress Plugin

Want to add custom breadcrumbs to your website?

Here’s the easiest way! Just a few clicks & you have customizable breadcrumbs at your service. Different models to choose from & the possibilitty to choose font, font color, font size, hover state & more.

Live preview | Detail

Customize WordPress Next and Previous Links

There is a << Next and >>Previous links at the bottom of each and every WordPress powered home page. This should be links to page 2, 3, 4, and 5, with options to jump to the end, the next 5, or back again. Otherwise with default WordPress << Next and >>Previous links, to get to “page 5? you have to click 5 times. That’s either going to make visitors leave your blog pretty quick, and keep a lot of users from getting to a lot of your content. To solve this problem, You should have a linked list of pages (like google) that says “this is page 1 of…” and links to “2, 3, 4, 5, etc”. It’s easy to fix this with plugins like WP-PageNavi or WP-Page Numbers.

Easy Pagination for WordPress

A true 2-in-1 product. Turn your long Posts and Pages into beautiful looking slideshows, as easy as inserting a few tags, by the click of your mouse. You can choose between 3 different transitions; Horizontal Slider, Vertical Slider or Fade. The Horizontal and Vertical slider can be combined with 32 jQuery Easing Effects. And you can choose between 6 different navigation templates and even customize it your self if you feel like it!

Detail

Add Next and Previous Links to WordPress Single Pages

The above plugins do not work for single post but by default  WordPress’s “single.php”  file shows a linked title to your previous and next posts. You can modify according to your theme design and can make them prominent to visitors which are mostly coming from Search engine, so they will come to know what is next and previously posted on your blog.

<div>
 <div><?php previous_post_link('&laquo; Post before this: %link') ?><br /></div>
 <div><?php next_post_link('%link &raquo; Post After This') ?></div>
 <div style="clear:both;"></div>
</div> [wordpress hack ways to improve navigation]

The above code will Blod the text “Post before this” and “Post After This.

Pages by User Role for WordPress

Are you a WordPress developer or a Web Designer who uses WordPress to develop websites for your clients?

Have you ever wanted not to show pages in the menu? Or wanted to restrict access to certain Pages, Posts, Custom Post Types or Categories based on the User Role level?

We have made this very easy with Pages by User Roles for WordPress.

This plugin lets you restrict access to a Page, Post, Custom Post Type or Categories depending on which Role the user has. It removes the Page, Post or Custom Post Type from search results and blog roll. You can hide Pages and Categories from the menu when the user is not logged in

Live preview | Detail

How to Customize More Links and Excerpts

After you write the post, you can choose a few extra options before you publishit for the entire world to see. Excerpts are short summaries of your posts that encourage  the reader to click the Read More link to read  the entire post. By default there is Excerpts box down the Post content  box, type your short summary in the Excerpt box. Excerpts have no word limit,but the idea is to keep them short and sweet.

On your homepage, you can use the Homepage excerpts plugin to achieve this. On all other pages, just the “the loop” and change the_content to the_excerpt. By using this plugin you can change homepage to excerpts, If you want to know how to customize and hack the theme code, you can find this information on the WordPress Codex page “Customizing the Read More”.

Add Multi-Paged Navigation in WordPress

Multi-page toolkit

This plugin is the ultimate companion for people who use the multi-page capabilities of wordpress. Easy to use fully integrated in to the wordpress visual editor (tinyMCE) (WordPress 2.5 and above) and simple to use options page to create great navigation links. No coding required !!!!

Using the nextpage button in the editor or the <!--nextpage--> quicktag you can create multi-page posts, and this plugin gives you three functions that extend this functionality even more!!

• Page Title button or Quicktag <!--pagetitle:-->

Create a title for each page in your multi-page post.

• Navigation Options

This function give you several pagination options choose from simply previous and next links, page title links and numbered links. Quick jump options include dropdown menu or a list menu using page numbers or page titles.

New option to display all pages on a single page (ALL page link). New option to have a custom seperator between pages on the single page view, great for adding advertising code or just to make it look pretty. New option to display navigation on multipage pages as well as posts.

• TA_display_pages

With this function you can quickly and easily display how many pages a particular post has on your index page. Choose from 3 formats ( 1 of 2 , Page 1, 3 pages). More Detail: wordpress hack 5 to improve navigation.

Download | Detail

Add Related Posts After Post Content

Following Related Posts plugins automatically inserts the related post block after your content, and you don’t have to paste any code in your template or theme files at all.

My related posts

This plugin is based around the concept of lists. You can create a list, then assign posts to it. (A post can only be on one list.) When a list is created, you edit the blog posts and assign them to the list. When a blog post is assigned to a list, they can be listed in your blog posts.

This plugin differs from the other ones out there, because it does no magic! (And that’s a good thing). You have to create a list. Assign various blog posts to that list.

You have complete control of your related posts, making this plugin a great asset when you create a series of blog posts, with different parts or chapters.

Detail

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) for WordPress

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) for WordPress gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Key features include: The YARPP templating system puts you in charge of how your posts are displayed.

Detail

If you’re interested in some other options, check out Customizable Post Listings, Random Posts, and WordPress plugin: Related Posts.

Display and fascinate Posts in WordPress

By creating unique post you should be showing your visitors your most valuable content. a great plugin called WP Post Views that has a sidebar widget than can display your most viewed posts! This is a great way to showcase your best posts and keep people on your blog.

ConMe WordPress Plugin

ConMe enables you to group your WordPress contents (post / page / category / other post type / other taxonomy).

You can easly manage your content into a Featured / Favorite / anything group. You can easly put the created group into Page or Post, and also using the Sidebar Widget.

You can create your own style for each group using your own HTML + CSS + JavaScript + Images + Flash, and share them with friends and other people who also uses the Styles with ConMe plugin. It has never been easier to add nice looking styling content group to your WordPress powered website.

Live preview | Detail

Popularity Contest

This plugin will help you see which of your posts are most popular. Views, comments, etc. are tracked and given configurable point values to determine popularity.

Download & Support

Easy Custom Content Types for WordPress

Easy Content Types provides an extremely easy to use and intuitive interface for creating custom post types, taxonomies, and meta boxes.

This plugin will completely remove the difficult task of manually creating custom post types, taxonomies, and meta boxes.

You’ll never have to touch another bit of complicated code again.

Live preview | Detail

WordPress Content Types Manager

WordPress Content Types Manager makes creating advanced content for your blog/website child’s play.

Simply install the plugin on your theme to create a more dynamic user experience, with no code editing.

This plugin lets you create:

• Custom Post Types – e.g Post, Product, Advert
• Custom Taxonomies – e.g Location, Business area, Range
• Custom Fields – Text, Textarea, Select Field, Checkbox field and colorpicker
• Custom Shortcodes – Easily create your own shortcodes for use throughout your blog or site
• Custom Theme Options: Fields, Text, Textarea, Select, Upload, Image Slider, Checkbox and Colour Picker

Detail

WP Pre Advertisement

This WordPress Plugin allows you to show an advertisement before showing the actual post. The plugin first loads an advertisement and shows a countdown. As soon as the countdown finishes the actual post gets loaded.

You can add any type of advertisement ( Image, Flash, Video, Text, … ) as the advertisements are just normal posts. You can even include a full post as an advertisement.

The Plugin Admin page allows you to set the default values for the advertisements.

Live preview | Detail

Post Validator

WordPress is full of wonderful settings built-in to allow for greater control over the material going into your posts. However, if you run a site with more than one author or you do not have time to moderate every detail about a post before it gets publish: WP POST VALIDATOR is the answer.

Detail

Post Series

The Post Series plugin creates a custom “series” post type and then builds the necessary interface to properly utilize it. Based on the same code that Tuts+ uses to create their sessions, but with some enhancements to the code base.

Detail

Premium Featured Posts Slider

• Show off your content the real way – in a slider!
• Feature any post, page or custom post type
• Includes 6 predefined layouts
• Customize layouts with 18 variables
• Global and per-post options
• Intuitive admin GUI with inline help
• Arrows and pagination slide controls
• Uses your theme’s CSS styles
• Extensive user friendly documentation
• No template editing needed if you use [fps]

Detail

How to Attach Images with Category in WordPress

This is the best option to assign images to the category names and display them instead of the text. Having categories linked with images which is a great way to get visitors to view everything else you have posted in that category. Assign images to the category names and display them instead of the text.  If you want to read in detail and want to know how to do it, read this article WordPress Theme Hack Show Category Images.

Category Icons Lite

Category Icons

After installation of this plugin you can assign icons to categories, which will be displayed next to the category title. This plugin is also used here at WPPG, and as you can see this plugin made a very nice graphical change to this blog. Just check the icons at the left of our post titles – see the post title above, with a ‘box icon’ which is assigned to the ‘various plugins’ category, the small icons positioned right to the menu options in the dropdown menu’s (in the blue navigation bar) Detail review.

Home page

How to Customize Sidebar Navigation in WordPress

There are many options for customizing WordPress sidebar, and most bloggers seem to just list categories, archives, and a blogroll. Check out all of the WordPress Widgets available, the WordPress Codex page for “Customizing Your Sidebar”, and especially the WordPress plugin iFrameWidgets.

Tabbed Content Shortcode

A clean, easy to integrate, reusable tabbed content area for your WordPress themes!

Features

• Reusable , add as many as you want on the page!
• Easy to use, activate and copy-paste the sample shortcodes to begin
• Auto sizing on a tab by tab basis
• Help and information admin page
• Easy to integrate into any design

Live preview | Detail

easySite – Infinite sidebars plugin

This is a technical, but very useful plugin which will help you to customize your WordPress website sidebar with different widgets for each page, post or category.

easySite infinite sidebars plugin is compatible with 3.+ version of WordPress. Also this plugins detect and applies to any custom post defined in your theme or plugins.

Live preview | Detail

Admin Menu Customization

Friendly Admin Menu

Give WordPress Admin interface a complete transformation with Friendly Admin Menu. Use it alone or in addition to the default WordPress Admin Menu.

Easy to use and a more logical menu layout using a tabbed interface with large icons. Uses built in JQuery library to keep it lightweight and fast loading, does not add any code to your themes.

Detail

My Domain List Plugin

The My Domain List Plugin for WordPress allows domain owners to manage, promote and sell their inventory of domains. If you are not interested in selling your domains, My Domain List plugin also helps you manage your list of inventory keeping track of expiration dates and domain registrars.

Live preview | Detail

WordPress CML

A suite of wordpress plugins that cater for corporate multi-lingual websites. It allows specific country level user control, a detailed post revision mechanism and a host of other features.

You can: Set up the plugin with all the countries you want posts / pages translated into. Designate users as specific country level users, giving them access to only translate their own language. Allow a page / post to be published, while a newer version of the page is worked on in the background.

Detail

WordPress Menu Plugin

UberMenu – WordPress Mega Menu Plugin

UberMenu is a user-friendly, highly customizable mega menu ( or mega drop down menu ) WordPress plugin. It works out of the box with the WordPress 3 Menu Management System, making it simple to get started but powerful enough to create highly customized and creative mega menu configurations.

Live preview | Detail

WP Sticky Menu Plugin

Sticky Menu Plugin has it’s own option panel from where you can select your styles, the alignment of the menu (Top or Bottom), the width of the menu (980px or Full Width). You can also select the animation effect for the sliding out and in of the menu. Watch the video for more information or buy it now.

Live preview | Detail

The latest version of WordPress 3.2.1  has gone gold and ships with an amazing new menu manager that can be used to control the navigation menus of your website. Hope after reading this post, you will make  better navigation and your visitors will stay longer on your blog, please comment if you have something to add or a question!

Related posts:

1. How to add navigation trail by using WordPress Plugin – BreadCrumb NavXT
2. How to Customize WordPress Post Order?
3. How to add/Show Images with WP-Category
4. How to Customize and Create a new Login Page for WordPress Powered WebSite
5. Improve Your WordPress blog With Flash and Video players

If you have tried all the optimizations, but are still not satisfied with the performance of your site, there are a few troubleshooting techniques you can use to identify the bottleneck.

1. Check your themes:

YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint. YSlow will tell you about large image files, broken links that are slowing down the loading of you blog page. With the help of this plugin you can fix such sort of problems.

2. Theme Optimization:

Here i am listing few tips which can speed up sites and will reduce the heavy load. Take a look at the header.php file.

Backup your header file before you try these changes. You can replace <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> with Your Site name , and <?php echo get_option(‘home’); ?> with http://sitename.com. e.g. http://wparena.com.

There are many other examples of this. In theme’s header file where the list of pages is displayed, change that function call with pages that you want to have listed. Compress  images used in your site’s themes that  will save some bandwidth.

3. Check your plugins:

Using a large number of plugins can slow down your site. So you should keep your eyes on all updates of installed plugins.

WordPress developer Donncha made a very powerful caching plugin called WP Super Cache, so speed up your site with caching. You can find out more about the wp-super-cache plugin here.

Check your plugins by deactivating one by one, if one creating any problem replace with latest one and remove if its not required any more. By removing the not required plugin will boost your site performance.

4. Optimizing your site through phpMyAdmin

4.1 Log in to phpMyAdmin and Click your site’s database.

4.2 Click “Check All” it will select all tables

4.3 From the drop-down menu, select Optimize table.

4.4 Thats it the database optimization task is completed.

You should optimize your database frequently, and once a week would be enough.

If its not possible for you, than the best option is cron job. A cron job is a job that is scheduled to execute periodically. This is the Automate database optimization.

Add following text line in your crontab if you have shell access on your VPS or by using your web site’s admin panel (cPanel has a web interface for setting up cron jobs).

0 0 * * 1 mysqlcheck -Aao –auto-repair -u root -p[password]

Where:

* * * * *
- – – – -
| | | | |
| | | | +—– day of week (0 – 6) (Sunday=0)
| | | +——- month (1 – 12)
| | +——— day of month (1 – 31)
| +———– hour (0 – 23)
+————- min (0 – 59)

The above example is mysqlcheck command which run once very Monday to check the database and auto-repair any problem it find during checkup.

5. Change the PHP memory limit:

If your site getting out of memory errors, Check out your PHHP.ini file on your web server if you and try to increase it. If you do not have access to PHP.ini on your web server, you can set the value for this in wp-config.php using this definition:

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);

6. Server side optimizations:

Test your server’s performance using JMeter

You can improving your web server’s performance at the the following Tutorials:
Optimizing Apache Server Performance

Apache Performance Tuning
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