One Thing All Bloggers Need to Do

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Okay, there’s a lot of things that bloggers should do. But today, I’m focusing on one that I sometimes forget, and it can really affect your traffic!

Most of us probably just use one browser – and perhaps have a backup browser, just in case. Because of this, you may not see how your site displays in a different browser. As nice as it would be to have our sites look and function exactly the same across all browsers, it’s just not that simple. For me, I rarely leave my Google Chrome browser (because, well, most others pale in comparison.)

Any time you make ANY kind of change to your blog – check it in every browser you can on both mobile and desktop/laptop computers.

This is important with design changes but also just with adding a piece of code to your site.

For example, a few months ago, I started a new partnership with a company. They sent me a simple piece of code that would add a recipe/shopping list to my recipe posts. It seemed simple enough, and when nothing seemed to break on my site in Google Chrome, I went on my merry way.

Well, a few weeks later, I was helping someone on their computer, and the only browser they had was Internet Explorer. I was trying to to show them something on Clarks Condensed, when I got to the site and realized two glaring issues:

My header was completely cut off
Even worse, the scroll bar on the browser would not scroll.

Considering the fact that one of the top used browsers by my readers was Internet Explorer, I realized this was a big issue. When I looked at my traffic, I noticed a decrease over the past few weeks, but I had initially attributed that to Pinterest being weird and changing their algorithm. I wasn’t totally sure if this was a browser issue, or a computer issue, so when I went home, I checked on our PC. Just as I feared, you couldn’t scroll. I then asked around in some different blogging Facebook groups, and everyone who checked in Internet Explorer had the same issue. Not good news!