Five Ways to Spring Clean Your Website

white rabbit next to a lap top

clean white rabbit on a deskDeciding to spring clean your website definately comes under the category of “things to do when I have the time.” But a spring clean is really useful – it gives you a chance to check your website is relevant, it gives a better experience for your visitors and it is good for Search Engine Optimisation.

Here are 5 things you can easily do to spring clean your website:

  1. Blogs – go through your blogs and delete old ones that are no longer relevant – it might be the announcement of a course, introducing a product you no longer offer, welcoming a member of staff who no longer works for you or something that is very time-specific. I have 10 years-worth of blogs, so I was able to get rid of a lot of old stuff that I had forgotten about. Look at the blogs that you have kept and update them – this is on my “to do” list, because a lot of my “how-to” guides have screenshots on, which are now out of date. If you up date them you can use them again on social media and you might impress yourself with how much useful information you have got to share! Finally think about your blog plan – reviewing your blogs will probably give you inspiration for new posts and highlight areas that you could write about.
  2. Links – when you review your blogs you may realise that a number of them are linked or that the information in the blogs supports what you have on your main pages. If this is the case, link the blogs and/or pages as necessary as this helps with SEO. You can also check for broken links either within your website or to external sites.  If you have a WordPress site  you can add a broken link checker plugin to do this for you. It will highlight the broken link so that you can go in and either redirect it or remove the link (you may need to change the wording slightly too.) Broken links are not only bad for SEO, but it is not a good user experience either.Screen shot showing title and alt-tag for an image
  3. Photos – have a look at your photographs and see whether you can update any of them – you may have new product shots or events that you have been to. Also look at the titles and alternative text (alt-tags) of your photographs  You have probably uploaded loads of photos as DSC1234.jpg. Go back in and change them to be relevant to the page it is on and link with your keywords (see image above) If you are showing images of a wedding bouquet with roses as an example of your products, give it a title of wedding-bouquet-with-roses. This means that search engines can find your image easily and it is likely to show up in the images associated with a search. Also have a look at the alt-tag – this is a description of the image which makes it accessible for people with a visual impairment. This really is the minimum you can do on your images – you can read a whole lot more about optimising images for SEO over on the Yoast website.
  4. Proof read your site – we know from experience that the process of putting a website live can take quite a long time and that many people just tick the job off the “to do” list. Many businesses rarely return to have a good proof-read of the text, trusting either that your original copy was correct, your copy-writers copy was correct or that the web designers corrected any typos. As the saying goes “assumption makes an ass of you and me” so go in and double-check for typos. Whilst you are at it check your prices, dates and any other information that changes over time – you want your readers to see information that is up to date
  5. Events – most of us have had to cancel, postpone or re-arrange events over the last few weeks due to coronavirus restrictions and you have probably updated those as appropriate. However I see so many websites that have old event dates on – e.g. we will be selling at the Farmers Market on the first Saturday of the month in 2019. Communication is key and events are a crucial part of many businesses. Make sure there are no old ones on your website – unless you are giving examples of past events – make it clear what is happening with events over the next few months (going on-line, cancelled, re-scheduled for autumn etc) and keep events up for later in the year to keep up your readers interest.
  • There are plenty of other things you could be doing to spring clean your website, but these are 5 things that you can look at fairly easily and without much technical knowledge.

We can provide help with:

  • writing blogs
  • reviewing, deleting, updating and linking blogs
  • broken-link detection and remedy
  • putting SEO titles and alt-tags on your images
  • proof-reading and writing new copy
  • updating you event entries on your website.

Please call us on 0758 4127644.

Spring clean image by: Photo by T S on Unsplash