After this weekends amazing weather I believe Spring is in the air (Finally). At home you may have spent the weekend spring cleaning your home, doing yard work, or cleaning that garage. How about at the office? Are you cleaning out desk drawers, deleting old emails, and organizing what you can?
It’s not just your living and work space that need attention though. While you should be maintaining your website on a regular basis, we know that for some of you that just doesn’t happen, as honourable as your intentions might be.
Here are a few tips you can do on your own to give your web image a little clean up as well.
Analyze Your Site
To properly perform website maintenance, you need to know what your website needs. To determine this, put yourself in your visitors’ shoes. Look around. Do you see anything that’s missing or can be approved upon? You may also want to consider having a co-worker look over your site. Ask them to provide an honest assessment, and then use their opinions to better the site.
Delete Dated Material
Delete any dated material—events, sales—anything that is in the past. When people visit your site and see events that have long passed, or sales that finished last week, it reflects poorly on you, your business, and your attention to detail.
Check Links
It’s not unusual for an external link to change or go offline. Every month it’s a good idea to do a quick check and make sure they are all working.
Test Forms
If you have a site that includes forms, do a trial run through them and make sure they are functioning properly. You could be losing business otherwise.
Refresh Your Content
After finding any outdated information, it’s time to spruce it up. Just because some of the content seems old or outdated, doesn’t mean a small facelift won’t throw some life into it. New facts or other information that is relevant can provide a nice boost to traffic from areas like social media, blogs or other content sharing locations that may not have seen the information before. You may even want to add some new pictures, infographics or videos.
There are also a few web maintenance tasks that we don’t recommend you do on your own, but still need be to reviewed.
DON’T do it yourself spring cleaning
- Update your content management system (CMS), themes and plugins to the latest version
- Deactivate and remove old plugins or themes that are not in use
- Free up space on your server by removing old files, such as newsletter archives from more than a year ago
Need help with front end or back end spring cleaning? Call Laurie Simone at 636-219-5492 or email laurie@gianthatworks.com
