So, you’re thinking about making a horse racing blog? Awesome! It is an interesting niche, and honestly, not oversaturated. But this doesn’t mean that you won’t face competition. As a new blog, you only have to worry about two things: does your content help people? And is your content delivered in the right way?
This means that you should have the right content strategy and a website structure that can attract that traffic. Since we are talking about WordPress, the most important thing is picking the right theme and plugins.
A horse racing blog, like any other blog, should be fast, responsive, and good-looking. This is not only important for search engines when it comes to ranking, but also for the user experience of your audience.
Let’s highlight the must-have themes or plugins that will help you launch a modern horse racing blog.
Why the Right Theme Matters
Your theme is the foundation of your blog. It not only sets the tone and dictates how content is displayed, but it also affects how readers interact with your site and how search engines crawl your site.
When it comes to horse racing, you’d want a theme that matches a horse storming through the gate (opening in under 2 seconds), and something that is lightweight and responsive on different devices.
You can take two paths here:
- You can either go for a popular WordPress theme that its already proven with thousands of reviews and downloads but has nothing to do with horse racing. (Avada, Betheme, X, Bridge, JupiterX)
- Or you can go with a specific horse racing theme with pre-built templates for blog posts, racing calendars and etc. (Equestrian, Pure Equestrian, Equine, Horseman)
I’d personally go with a basic theme that’s popular and already proven. You can always build additional features and customize the blog more towards the horse racing niche, but you cannot make the theme faster and easier to work with.
If you are building a blog about horse racing betting where handicappers hang out, it’s better to start with a solid (basic) theme and build more features like odds tracking and past results checker on top of the theme.
Handicappers use plenty of different tools to analyze races, so installing various features can bring you plenty of organic traffic. Horse racing handicapping is so big at the moment that you can go to TwinSpires and look for the best horse bets. This proves that it is a good niche with plenty of opportunity for traffic, but only with the right plugins.
Specific horse racing themes are good, but they are less popular, which means that they have fewer updates, and the code is usually not really clean.
First Optimization
If you are new to WordPress, it is better to go with a theme that is built with Elementor. This plugin will make your job much easier, and people without much knowledge about themes can build a beautiful blog in minutes.
But when you install the theme, make sure you get a maintenance mode plugin. This will help you display a specific page telling your audience that the website is coming soon.
Now that that’s ready, let’s talk about cache, image optimization, and more essentials. A good caching plugin that will speed up your site is WP Rocket. This is, without a doubt, one of the best plugins out there that will make your theme (code) even smoother.
If you have plenty of images on your horse racing blog, it’s a good idea to install an image optimization plugin like EWWW or Imagify.
Lastly, I’d add a contact form plugin like Fluent Forms or Contact Form 7, which will allow you to create custom contact pages where people can send you emails. Since you have a contact form on your blog, you’ll get a lot of spam on both your email and blog comments, so I’d suggest installing the Antispam Bee plugin to get rid of all the unnecessary comments.
Optimizing for SEO and Performance
Remember, even the best articles won’t show up on search engines if they cannot read your website. So, the moment you start your blog, you should install an SEO plugin. There are a lot of people saying, “SEO is dead,” but that’s not the case.
Keywords, article structure, and backlinks still matter A LOT! So, installing a plugin like YoastSEO or Rank Math can help you optimize your posts for keywords, help you structure meta descriptions, and improve your internal linking.
I’d personally go with Yoast SEO since it is a more versatile plugin. It will give you content change suggestions, keywords to target, and even create a sitemap for your blog to rank better on search engines.
Horse Racing Plugins
Since we are talking about a horse racing blog, having plugins like odds tracker or past result checker is quite useful for your audience. However, these plugins are usually more complicated to install since they require an API connection (somewhere to get the data).
They are also quite heavy, so you should think twice about whether they are worth it.
Monetizing Your Blog
Lastly, you’d eventually like to make money with your blog, right? At the moment, you are probably not getting much traffic, so there is no point in slowing down your website by adding a monetization plugin.
But in the future, you should consider adding a plugin like WooCommerce if you plan on selling merchandise. If not, you can install ContentEgg, which is a great Affiliate plugin allowing you to recommend products almost automatically (through an API), and earn a commission.
If you are doing the hardcore way and running your own ads or selling web spaces, you should install Ad Inserter. This is a great plugin that will analyze your website and give you the ability to insert ads for a specific amount of time that will show up automatically.
So, that’s about it. Since this is the beginning of your horse racing blog, you should probably focus more of your time towards finding the right topics to write about, but make sure these essentials are already set up.
