Website design for bloggers

Blogs fail for different reasons than businesses do

A business website converts a handful of visitors into enquiries. A blog earns fractions of a penny per visit and makes its money at scale — which means every millisecond of load time, every point of bounce rate and every abandoned page view is money, repeated across hundreds of thousands of sessions.

The usual failure is weight. A theme bought from a marketplace, six plugins, a slider nobody scrolls, four web fonts, a related-posts widget doing database queries on every page load. Then an ad stack is added on top, and a site that was merely slow becomes genuinely painful. Traffic that took years to build starts leaking away for reasons the author can’t see.

The second failure is renting your audience. Traffic from search and social is borrowed — an algorithm change can halve it in a week, and it happens to somebody every year. An email list is the only part of a blog you actually own.

What we build for bloggers

• Genuinely fast pages. Hand-written HTML and CSS. No theme, no page builder, no plugin stack. Images sized and served in modern formats, lazy-loaded below the fold, with dimensions set so nothing jumps as the page arrives.
• An ad layout that doesn’t wreck the experience. Ad slots with reserved space, so units load into a fixed gap instead of shoving the article down the screen. Cumulative layout shift is a ranking signal and the single most common way ad-funded blogs damage themselves.
• An archive built to last. Categories and tags that mean something, pagination that doesn’t strand your older work, a search that functions, and internal linking that keeps readers moving through the back catalogue.
• Email capture that isn’t obnoxious. Inline sign-ups at the natural stopping points in a post, wired into whatever platform you use. Interstitials that cover the content on mobile are penalised by Google and resented by readers.
• Typography for actual reading. A sensible line length, real spacing, proper contrast, and a dark mode that follows the reader’s device. People read blogs in bed on a phone.
• The right structured data. Article, Recipe, HowTo, BreadcrumbList and author markup as appropriate, so your posts are eligible for rich results and Google Discover.
• An editor you’ll tolerate. You keep writing where you already write. We connect the site to it rather than making you learn a new system.

Speed and money are the same conversation

Display advertising is a bargain between you and the reader: they tolerate the ads, you keep the site usable. Break that and both sides lose.

The premium ad networks assess site quality before they take you on and hold you to standards afterwards, and their thresholds are about traffic and experience. A site that loads in half a second with well-placed ad slots earns a materially better rate than one that takes four seconds and shifts under the reader’s thumb — on identical traffic.

So we build the shell to be as close to weightless as possible, precisely because the ad scripts you add later will not be. That headroom is the whole point.

Monetisation, built in from the start

• Display ads. Reserved slots, sensible density, and integration with whichever network you’re with or aiming at.
• Affiliate content. Comparison tables, product blocks and review layouts that actually get clicked — plus disclosure handled properly. UK advertising rules require affiliate and paid content to be obvious to the reader upfront, not buried in a footer, and Google expects the links themselves to be tagged correctly.
• Sponsored posts. A media kit page with your real numbers, so brands can qualify you without a back-and-forth.
• Your own products. Ebooks, presets, courses, printables — sold directly from the site on the Growth plan rather than losing a cut to a marketplace.
• Memberships and paid newsletters. Where a proportion of your readers would happily pay for more of you.

Moving an existing blog

If you have years of posts on WordPress, Squarespace, Blogger or Medium, the migration is the risky part and we treat it that way. Every URL is mapped, every redirect is written, images come across at full resolution, and internal links are rewritten rather than left pointing at your old domain.

Done properly you keep your rankings. Done carelessly — which is how it is usually done — you lose a decade of accumulated authority in a weekend, and getting it back is far harder than not losing it.