Cleaner Websites - Faster Results
The growth of your site affects its performance. The amount of data your site processes affect how quickly it loads and performs essential functions. It’s important to clean your website on a regular basis for best results.
For optimal performance, take time to tidy up your site. You can improve performance by eliminating unnecessary data and content, optimizing images and files, and performing maintenance tasks such as checking for broken links and updating everything.
How often you need to do this depends on your site and the systems in place. Sites that add new content regularly will naturally accumulate more clutter to clean up.
How to Clean Your Website
Regularly checking your pages and blog posts is a great way to keep them relevant and appealing to those visiting your site. Keep reading and follow these seven effective ways to thoroughly clean your website.
1. Streamline Your Site by Removing Post Revisions
Every time you make an adjustment and save that edited post or page, a revision is created. You need to streamline and remove the the post revisions before they start to affect your website speed.
Imagine how many revisions you might have for only one article. These revisions will add up, and eventually slow down your website speed.
You can eliminate unneeded content using a plugin like WP-Optimize 3.2.12. Old revisions of posts, in addition to plugins and themes, can accumulate and cause clutter on your site. These revisions contribute to site bloat.
Although WordPress does not have a built-in method to remove outdated post revisions, you can easily accomplish this task by using a plugin. For example, WP-Optimize 3.2.12 plugin enables you to decide which revisions to keep and which to discard.
To avoid excessive revisions and maintain a clutter-free site, consider installing a plugin like Revision Control, which allows you to limit the number of saved revisions. Alternatively, you can disable revisions completely by adding a little code to your site’s wp-config.php file.
2. Discard Outdated Information
With time, things change, services improve, and website content can become obsolete. The first step in spring cleaning your website is to get rid of pages and blog posts that no longer align with your business.
Outdated content can lead to confusion and disappointment for those searching for answers on your site.
Ensure everything on your website aligns with your company’s vision and serves future customers in the best way possible.
3. Refresh Evergreen Content
Do you have blog posts written years ago that still hold relevance today? Instead of writing new posts, take some time to review your older articles and see what can be updated or refreshed for your audience.
Updating your website content lets search engines know that you are committed to sharing the most up-to-date and vital information.
When updating your website, consider which type of content will be most impactful for the message you want to convey.
4. Check Your Links
Broken links can negatively affect your SEO ranking. If a user clicks on a link and ends up at a dead end, they are likely to return to the search results to find a more reliable source.
Go through your website pages to inspect internal and external links, ensuring they still lead to the correct page on the other end.
During this process, you may also discover new linking opportunities that will benefit your site visitors in the future.
5. Check Images and Delete Unfinished Drafts
Graphics are essential for capturing and retaining a visitor’s attention on a website. Update website content like photos, images, and videos to keep them relevant and relatable to potential customers.
Updating photos will also positively impact SEO. Ensure that images are 1500-2500 pixels wide at most and keep photo file sizes under 500 KB to avoid slowing down site speed.
Do you have a blog post or page in your draft queue for a long time? It’s time to either finish it or move on. Uncompleted articles can lead to a messy content management system.
To clean your website, remove those drafts or finish writing them. Keep your digital space organized by avoiding a long list of unwritten content.
6. Revoke Access for Outdated Users and Scan for Malware
If you’ve experienced specific changes since your last website clean-up, you would want to review who has access to your CMS. You wouldn’t want a former employee to access your content and make unwanted modifications.
Check who still has login details and revoke their access to the system. Also, take advantage of each website update to change your password and maintain its security.
You must take proper measures to ensure website security as an undetectable attacker can plant malware on your website. That can lead to broken trust with customers, a negative impact on your bottom line, and harm to your search engine ranking. Hire a reliable web design company to fix and prevent future malware issues.
7. Evaluate and Decide which Pages to Update or Delete
It’s common to come across pages on your website that need updating or may no longer be relevant or accurate. You must determine if these pages need to be updated or removed from your website.
Start by making a list of pages that require attention. If multiple people are working on this task, consider using a system like Trello to keep track of the progress.
If a page is no longer relevant or appropriate for your website, delete it and redirect the URL to a related page. Ideally, redirect the URL to a related article to preserve incoming traffic.
If infeasible, redirect to a related category page or homepage. To signal to users and Google that the page has been deliberately deleted, you must serve a 410 Content Deleted error.
The Rank Math SEO plugin includes a redirect manager that makes it easy to create redirects without needing to get a developer. The plugin will even prompt you to determine the next step when you delete a post or page.
Conclusion
Using outdated software versions can pose serious risks, such as exposing your site to security vulnerabilities, disrupting compatibility with other tools installed on your site, and significantly slowing down its performance.
Thus, it’s worthwhile to ensure everything on your site is up-to-date. Fortunately, you can accomplish this process with a single click.
Next, ensure you update all your existing plugins and themes. All you need to do is go to the Plugins and Themes sections of your WordPress dashboard; look for those with an “Update” message and click on Update Now.
Keeping your plugins up-to-date is essential for protecting your site and maintaining its optimal performance. Consider utilizing your hosting plan’s automatic update capability for a hassle-free solution.
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