Website Spring Cleaning!

5 Ways to Spring Clean Your Website
Just like your home, your business website also needs a spring-cleaning. It’s easy to let things slide, and the consequence of that would be a decline in traffic, reputation and ultimately sales. This is a relatively insidious way to lose traction with your website, as you don’t immediately see it happening. But it’s quite real, and will have very real results.

So in the spirit of prevention, listed below are 5 ways for you to make a positive change in the way your sites appear, operate and prosper.

• Are your pages loading quickly? – It’s been said you’ve got less than 10 seconds to load your page or most people will abandon and head for faster, greener pastures. If your website is image heavy, and full of flash, you may well want to optimize for faster performance. Remember, Google will punish your site in the search rankings when your pages load too slowly.

• Old products, programs, links lurking – Make sure you remove any old product, programs and links that are no longer pertinent. Nothing says your page is stale and dated more than your PDF download from 2008 that’s not only outdated but unavailable. Dead links and 404 page errors will not help your search rankings either. “Broken link” detector plug-ins are available and will automatically alert you when a link is no longer valid.

• Stale content and old images – Likewise cull out text and images that are no longer topical. Those awesome pictures from 2007 which feature people no longer working with you can perhaps be archived, don’t you think? People and search engines are both after fresh, current content!

• Refresh your social media – Ensure that your social media buttons not only link to your current social media sites, but that you are up to date with them.

• More fresh content that rocks – There is nothing you can do to help in this respect more than to inject a fresh dose of new, relevant to 2013 content! If you have content on the first page of your blog that is more than a month old, you definitely need to be more aggressive with your content strategy.

It’s spring, and time to get cleaning. You’ll be glad you did!