Your Business’ Website: It’s Time to Do Some Spring Cleaning
Business Technology | April 22, 2014
5 Ways to Spring Clean Your Website
It’s that time of year, when all of us get around to doing a bit of spring cleaning, this also ought to apply to your business website, also. It’s way too easy to allow this task go by the wayside, but the consequences of this is a progressive loss of visitors, a poor site reputation and even sales. Although this can be a rather insidious way to weak performance, as you don’t normally see it happening, it’s still a very real problem.
Here are 5 simple actions you can take that can make a big improvement in the way your sites appear, operate and prosper.
- How fast do your pages load? – You have under 10 seconds to load your page or the majority of people will exit and go somewhere else. Some reasons for slow loading pages are too many images, pages built mostly with Flash, and errors in your site code. This is something you want to check on, as Google will punish your site in the search rankings if your pages take a long time to load.
- Old products, programs, links lurking – Be sure you remove any old product, programs and links that are no longer relevant. Almost nothing says 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 will also not help your search rank, either.
- Stale content and old images – Likewise cull out text and images that are no longer topical. Those awesome pictures from 2007 that feature people no longer working with you can perhaps be archived, don’t you think? People and search engines are after fresh, current content!
- Social media – Make 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 may not be displayed with your social buttons.
- More fresh content that rocks – There is nothing 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 should be more aggressive with your content strategy.
It’s spring, and time to get about cleaning. You’ll be glad you did!
5 Ways to Spring Clean Your Website
It’s that time of year, when all of us get around to doing a bit of spring cleaning, this also ought to apply to your business website, also. It’s way too easy to allow this task go by the wayside, but the consequences of this is a progressive loss of visitors, a poor site reputation and even sales. Although this can be a rather insidious way to weak performance, as you don’t normally see it happening, it’s still a very real problem.
Here are 5 simple actions you can take that can make a big improvement in the way your sites appear, operate and prosper.
- How fast do your pages load? – You have under 10 seconds to load your page or the majority of people will exit and go somewhere else. Some reasons for slow loading pages are too many images, pages built mostly with Flash, and errors in your site code. This is something you want to check on, as Google will punish your site in the search rankings if your pages take a long time to load.
- Old products, programs, links lurking – Be sure you remove any old product, programs and links that are no longer relevant. Almost nothing says 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 will also not help your search rank, either.
- Stale content and old images – Likewise cull out text and images that are no longer topical. Those awesome pictures from 2007 that feature people no longer working with you can perhaps be archived, don’t you think? People and search engines are after fresh, current content!
- Social media – Make 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 may not be displayed with your social buttons.
- More fresh content that rocks – There is nothing 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 should be more aggressive with your content strategy.
It’s spring, and time to get about cleaning. You’ll be glad you did!