The spring season signals new beginnings and an opportunity for homeowners to spruce things up to keep the home thoroughly clean and clutter free. The spring clean-up routine can be extended to the website to help improve everything from the site’s functionality and usability to relevance.
A comprehensive clean-up campaign will include fixing the plugins, broken links, images, content and indexing issues. If implemented fully, these changes can go a long way to increasing your website’s traffic.
You can clean and optimize your website from the beginning by:
- choosing a great host (I personally have been using Siteground for many years now!)
- reliable Content Delivery Network (CDN) website connection
- adopting cache plugin
- using a seamlessly fast theme and framework
At A Glance
How to clean up your site
Here are 6 ways to make this happen:
1. Deleting unwanted plugins
As the website content grows, you can improve the element of functionality by continually adding fresh content, themes and plugins.
However, having too much data to process will make your site bloated and inefficient and lead to slow uploads and negative user experience. Due to the presence of database bloat, unwanted plugins can also increase your site’s vulnerability.
To remedy the situation, you need to deactivate or uninstall unwanted plugins. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, simply go to the dashboard and select the plugin that you want to deactivate or uninstall.
The plugins installed on your website must be essential and add value. The plugins should target SEO, security and optimization of images and other contents. Only pick the options that will help you improve security, loading speeds, user-engagement and conversion rates.
Check out this list of recommended plugins I use to optimize my site for SEO.
The themes that are not being used should also be removed or deactivated to save resources and enhance a website’s performance.
2. Update everything
Sites with outdated softwares often face serious problems, including compatibility errors, slow website and security holes.
Plugins and themes can be updated from the CMS dashboard. If the system allows, you can configure automatic software updates.
3. Remove unused media files
Old media files, images, videos and GIF files often take a huge chunk of resources. Unused graphic files can be deleted manually or via specialized cleaning tool such as Media Cleaner.
To avoid the build of old unused files, the media clean must be performed on a regular basis, especially after adding new images.
4. Optimize the images on your website
You can build a leaner media library by optimizing the existing files. This should only be done after all unused and outdated images are removed.
Although most site owners tend to overlook the importance of optimizing images, the process is simple as it entails reducing image size without compromising quality and load times.
Quality images often make it easy for crawlers to operate and ensure your site ranks favourably on search engines like Google.
According to Shopify, here are 7 ways to optimize the images on your website:
- Label your images descriptively using simple and clear language
- Make every effort to optimize your images’ alt attributes
- Choose the right type of files
- Minimize your file size
- Pick fitting image dimensions and product angles
- Optimize the thumbnails
- Deploy image sitemaps
The file size has a lot to do with loading speeds. It is also important to note that search giant Google uses page load time as a pivotal site ranking factor. The problem of low loading speeds can be overcome by reducing the file size.
When resizing your files, do not overlook the importance of quality. If you are using Adobe Photoshop, pay attention to the following image aspects: quality, colour, optimization, file format, downsizing and sharpening and the expected file size.
The 3 main types of file formats for posting images on the Web are PNG, GIF and JPEG. Because of underlying differences, always choose your files wisely.
For instance, JPEG files are ideal for eCommerce websites since they offer high quality images for a correspondingly small size. GIF files are generally larger and should only be used for decorative images or thumbnails. PNG files can be used as a substitute file type to both GIF and JPEG files.
If you use the WordPress CMS, using a free plugin like Smush can help you optimize the images with just click of a button.
Another plugin that I use that is highly recommended is ShortPixel Image Optimizer.
Alternatively to save on plugins, you can also compress your images manually through sites like I Love Img which I use before uploading any pictures on WordPress.
5. Mend broken links
Broken links that can lead users to non-existent pages should be quickly rectified as they are considered unprofessional. Broken links can also devalue your SEO efforts and provide a negative user experience.
The most common errors include standard HTTP response showing in-existence URL and the 404-error page.
WordPress users can then use Broken Links Checker and Redirection plugins (like Rank Math) to cure the link problem.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to dealing with broken links:
Find broken links
A plugin tool like Broken Link Checker can help you spot and fix broken links automatically.
Alternatively, to save on another plugin, You can run your site on free website checker such as Online Broken Link Checker to identify broken list easily.
Create a report and take note of the changes
Once the broken link is identified, the next step is creating a spreadsheet file for tracking the link redirect decisions.
The items that need to be documented under a “Broken Link Redirect Report” include broken links data, unique page views and the overall page view.
For Google Analytics, the most feasible way to go about the process is exporting and downloading the report.
Analyze your data and redirect pages
Before redirecting the broken links, you are strongly advised to analyze the pages and the reasons they have failed. Some of the reasons you might establish include frequent visits and mis-typed or incorrect URLs.
When redirecting your links, focus on links prone to errors and those that attract most users.
2 of the most effective curative measures include highlighting the URL with a different colour and redirecting links to the domain homepage.
You can then redirect broken links or deleted pages with plugins like Rank Math.
6. Update old posts
This piece of information should never be disregarded when spring cleaning a website since outdated or incorrect information will lead visitors astray and cause confusion.
If your site has many new information, train your focus on removing old and obsolete posts. We will go in detail how to find and update old posts in our next article.
So there you have it, 6 tips to spring clean your site.
I know it looks like a lot of work but trust me, it will take you just 4-5 hours. And you will be greeted with a faster website which ranks higher in Google. Not too bad for 4-5 hours of work!
P.S. I’ve recently published my latest video here on the fears that I experience on becoming a full-time travel blogger. Don’t miss it!
