Do you do any “spring cleaning”? During the spring, many people take time to do some deep cleaning and purging in their homes. But how about doing some spring cleaning on your website? Get inspired with these seven steps to spring cleaning your website!
Spring is the perfect time to complete those website maintenance tasks you may be putting off! Updating, optimizing, and editing your website attracts more visitors, improves user experience, and boosts your search engine rankings.
Keep Your Website in Top-Notch Condition
Remember, visitors don’t spend a long time on your website. Broken links, missing images, slow speed, or any other issue will discourage visitors from staying on your website.
If you have your own website, you should have a checklist of things you do weekly, monthly, or yearly to keep your site in top-notch shape. After all, it’s one of your business’s most important marketing tools. In this article, I’ll cover what you should focus on when “spring cleaning” your website.
First, Do a Backup
Before doing anything, run a backup of your website. A website backup is a copy of your website’s files and database that can be used to restore your website in case of a disaster or data loss.
Regular website backups are essential to protect data and content. Use a backup plugin or service to schedule regular backups and store them in a secure location. This will give you peace of mind and ensure you can quickly recover from any unexpected issues.
Here are a few key tasks to keep your website fresh and functioning well! (Be sure to print this out to reference later)
7 Steps for Spring Cleaning Your Site:
1) Run Updates
Identify and run any necessary updates to your plugins, themes, and WordPress version (in that order). These updates often contain security patches and bug fixes. It’s important to keep everything up-to-date so your website remains secure and functioning properly. If you’re not sure how to do that, check out my article on how to update your WordPress website.
2) Check for Broken Links
Broken links frustrate visitors and hurt your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Use a link checker tool to scan your website for any broken links and fix them immediately. Then, you can deactivate the link checker plugin until the next time you want to scan for broken links.
Your visitors will spend more time perusing your website if they don’t encounter broken links and missing images.
3) Proofread Your Text
Poor grammar, spelling mistakes, and typos will make your website look unprofessional and hurt your credibility. Fortunately, today’s technology tools for writing make it easy to catch these errors. Grammarly, Hemingway, WordTune, and Yoast SEO will help identify grammar and spelling errors and opportunities to make your writing clearer and concise. These tools can save you time and help you produce higher-quality content for your website.
Proofreading your website’s text and making any necessary changes will improve the overall quality of your content. As a result, your visitor will have a better experience!
4) Add Featured Images to Your Pages or Posts
Double-check that all your pages and posts have a featured image! WordPress uses the featured image differently, depending on your theme. For example, your featured image will be at the top of the page/post, as a thumbnail on the blog page, and in the blog post category pages. Plus, social media uses the featured image when you post the link to that page or post.
Featured images are important for engaging your website visitors. It’s the first image that the visitor will see on the page or post, so it should be eye-catching and relevant.
5) Review Your Website’s Content
Take some time to check your website for outdated information or missing images. One easy way to ensure your articles rank in Google is to update alt-tags and descriptions on your images. Then, look at your blog post excerpts and ensure you have a short article description.
Keeping your content fresh and relevant can help improve your website’s search engine rankings and keep visitors engaged. Need a content idea? Check out my five simple content ideas for your website>.
Also, try out a tool like ChatGPT to freshen up your content! You can copy and paste text directly into ChatGPT and ask the AI tool to proofread or change the tone or length of the text.
6) Optimize your Website Speed
Website speed is a critical factor for user experience and search engine optimization. Slow-loading websites will frustrate visitors and cause them to leave your site. Use a tool like Google’s Pagd eSpeed Insights to analyze your website’s speed and identify areas for improvement.
Some common optimizations include compressing images, minifying code, and enabling caching. Just a note: browser caching is different from website caching. In addition to adding a caching plugin, you may consider a CDN Network for your hosting (this is a techie article).
One of the most important factors in speed is the hosting company you choose. Here are four hosting companies we like for WordPress
7) Check for Mobile Responsiveness
Is your website easily viewable and usable on mobile devices? With more and more people accessing the internet on their smartphones and tablets, your website must be optimized for mobile. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you could miss out on many potential traffic and customers! Go here to check your site to see if it’s mobile-responsive.
Also, be sure to review our full glossary of website-building terms. It’s a great place to start if you encounter WordPress terms you don’t understand.
Start Spring Cleaning Now…
Your home and car require routine care and maintenance. And your website does, too. Block out some time to perform key tasks like backing up your website, running updates, checking for broken links, proofreading your text, adding featured images, reviewing your content, optimizing your website speed, and checking for mobile responsiveness.
Don’t feel like you need to do everything all at once. You can tackle one task per week or month over the course of the year. By completing these simple tasks, you’ll be able to keep your website fresh and functioning well. As a result, you’ll keep your visitors engaged and interested in you, your products, and your services.
Give your website some extra attention this spring to keep running smoothly and help you serve your customers well.
