Spring Cleaning Applies to Websites, Too!
Just like your home, your business website also needs a spring-cleaning. It’s very easy to let things slide, and the results of that could be a steady decline in traffic, reputation and ultimately sales. This is a relatively insidious way for you to lose traction with your website, as you don’t conclusively see it occurring. But it’s very real, and can have very real results.
Here are 5 simple steps you can take which will make a huge improvement 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 the majority of people will abandon and head for faster, greener pastures. If your website is image heavy, and packed with flash, you may well want to optimize for faster performance. Moreover, Google will penalize your site in the search rankings when your pages load too slowly.
- Old products, programs, links lurking – Be sure you remove any old product, programs and links that are no longer pertinent. Almost nothing helps say your page is stale and dated more than your PDF download from 2008 that’s not only dated but unavailable. Dead links and 404 pages don’t help your search rank, either.
- Stale content and old images – Likewise cull out text and images that are no longer topical. All those great pictures from 2007 which feature people no longer working with you can probably be archived, don’t you think? People and search engines are usually after fresh, current content!
- Social media – Be sure that your social media buttons not only link to your current social media sites, but that you are up-to-date with them. Pinterest and Instagram are later entries that might not be displayed with your social buttons.
- More fresh content that rocks – There isn’t anything you can do to help in this respect more than to provide a fresh dose of new, relevant to 2013 content! If you’ve got content on the first page of your blog that is more than a month old, you definitely need to be more active with your content strategy.
It’s spring, and time to get about cleaning. You’ll be glad you did!
