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Just like your home, your blog needs to be organized & cleaned of clutter. It’s easy to let your blog go when you’re focusing on content, forums, and social networking but by maintaining your blog regularly, you’ll help it run more efficiently and stay visually appealing as well.

PLUGINS

• Sort through your plugins and delete all the unneccessary ones.  Just like widgets, plugins can be addicting so you probably have several sitting there collecting dust.
• Analyze the performance of certain plugins.  If they don’t do their job to your expectations, find a new one to replace it.
• Upgrade any that haven’t been already. With WP 2.5, it’s super easy to upgrade now!

WIDGETS (SIDEBARS)

• organize your widgets into sections.  Most people do this with their sponsored ads, you know, up in the right corner?  But for some reason, many people let the rest of their sidebars go.  Some sections to have could be a resource section, blogroll, vote for me badges, etc.
• Get rid of the heavy widgets that bulk up your sidbars.  I see many widgets that show content from other bloggers.  If you’re a personal blogger, that’s fine but if you’re a serious blogger, the last thing you want to do is provide content links that may lead your readers away from your blog.  If a link of sorts is required to have your link at their place, do just that, use a simple text link or button.
• Use recent posts and popular posts.  These 2 widgets can keep your readers on your blog longer.  It also will give them a sense of what you write and what other readers like.
• Move your blogrolls to their own posts/pages.  Blogrolls tend to make a page load slower so I recommend that, if you’re going to have them, put them in their own home.  If you put them in a post, you can always back date them and then provide a text link in the sidebar.

AD MANAGEMENT (OIO-Publisher PLUGIN)

• Use something like OIO-Publisher to manage your ads.  Powerful plugin and super user friendly.
• Take advantage of alternate ad rotation until your ad spots get filled.  There is a place to put the image urls and destination urls so that different ads will rotate until they get filled.  What I love, is that you don’t have to do anything but provide those urls and then after that, the plugin does the rest.  If an advertiser buys a slot, it put their image up for you!  LOVE IT!
• Update your advertise page if needed.  I’ve written a basic advertise page with links to purchase.  Those links are managed through my dashboard via the oio plugin so that I don’t have to go and actually edit my advertise page.  I simply go to my dashboard and change my ad price if I want to.

PROFILE & ABOUT ME PAGE

• Go back over your profile and about me pages and make sure things are still correct.   Over time, some things have probably changed so it’s important to note those changes. 
• Link to your other blogs from your about me page.  I’m really surprised at how many people don’t do this. 

POST CATEGORIES

• For me, a big turn off is 50 categories.  My time is limited and precious at that so spending 5 minutes reading through a million categories is the last thing I want to do.  Try to have 10 or less categories because chances are, I’m only going to read the first 5.
• Keep your categories as relevant as possible.  Example for a personal blog: You have to categories - blogging and blogging tips.  Do you really need them both?  If you write about home, parenting, and relationships; blogging should be a specific enough category to use.  Get rid of the excess and keep it simple.

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