How To Spring Clean Your Website This Weekend

Spring is in the air! Nature is blooming, days are longer, and everyone is enjoying the sunshine before the summer kicks in, and we all take refuge from the heat. But spring is known for one more thing – spring cleaning. As we all wake up from the slumber of winter months, we start furiously preparing our homes and gardens for the season ahead. The question is, if you clean your real-life house every spring, do you clean your website, your internet house?

Your website is your virtual home, and you should treat it as such. Being a home, it needs some maintenance every now and then.

The first thing you should maintain when you get to work is your domain. This is something very important, and we can not stress the need to do this enough. Domains are usually registered for a year or two, depending on your preference, and must be renewed if you don’t want to lose that .something, and without that, your site can’t function properly. So be sure to renew your domain name with your hosting provider while you’re cleaning up your site.

Greasing Up The Moving Parts

All this talk about hosting reminds us: you need to also renew your hosting service. The same general rules apply for domains and hosting, and if you don’t renew the hosting your site is at risk of being taken down, and that’s something we definitely do not want. So roll up those sleeves and get that domain and hosting serviced for the next year of visits, so both you and your guests have a pleasant experience.

Even though many people do know this, just in case you don’t: your site lives on a server, and is powered by a CMS, or a Content Management System. These systems are the ones that actually let you put things on your site, and are the ones responsible for interacting with you, the user, the most.

While you may see the pattern from the previous two pieces of advice, we strongly suggest you update your CMS as often as possible, so it’s always fitted with the latest features the developers have provided. It’s also free, so why shouldn’t you? This is very important because it not only lets you stay up to date with the newest plugins and everything else, but it makes your website more stable, faster and more protected, and that’s what you want from your home. Well, not the “faster” part, but everything else.

Automation Is Great – When Supervised

Next up is to polish all of the bits that are automated. That includes your forms, widgets, comments, automatic emails and such. When someone tries to fill out a contact form, for example: does the form have all the latest information and relevant data? Does it point to the right e-mail address?

You need to make sure that every person that visits your site gets the best experience possible, so the forms need to work precisely the way you need them to. Give them a quick check, delete unnecessary things, perhaps add something new, and there you go: as good as new.

Widgets can get pretty tricky, especially in WordPress. Considering that a lot of widgets are actually third-party apps, you need to keep them updated if you want them to work. If your site has a Facebook ticker or a video player: make sure that those are working properly. You may not notice them a lot, but they can get an error or two and just stop working, something your site should not have. So update those widgets and web apps, and keep them looking sharp and fresh.

Next up are automatic e-mails and comments. You need to make sure that people can leave a comment on your site the easiest way possible. Of course, that only applies if you want to allow comments in the first place, but a lot of times commenters lose the desire to leave positive feedback because the comment system is not working for some reason. Check that up, and fix it if needed. Automatic e-mails are also something that needs to be checked. You need to make sure that they work properly, so we advise you to try those out and make sure everything’s alright.

Take Out The Trash – Or Delete It?

You need to start the dirty work somewhere, and just as you’d start cleaning your home by taking out the trash and all of the things you do not need anymore, you should start your website cleaning the same way: by deleting everything that you don’t need anymore. There’s certainly something you need to throw out of your home that just isn’t necessary anymore, and the same can be applied to your website.

There’s always something that just doesn’t cut it anymore. Either there’s some content that is not relevant anymore, like your about me description that needs updating or old promotions that are outdated but still invite guests to participate. Be careful not to leave outdated content on your site for too long, because leaving old and irrelevant promotions, offers and content, in general, can hurt you SEO score, which will, in turn, hurt your site in general. And deleting things is also oddly satisfying, isn’t it?

Old But (not so) Gold

If you do need to keep some of the older content on your website for whatever reason, we got you covered. Just like new bedding can liven up a room, or new curtains can let a lot of needed light into your life, a few tweaks here and there can liven up otherwise boring content.

You can come back to the posts you’ve written ages ago and add a new level of creative input into them. Be it with some new paragraphs if you’re a blogger, or some new photos or infographics, everything works as long as it elevates that old content to newer levels. You can then use the refreshed content as something you can brag with, not something you hide under the bed when you have people coming over.

Another neat trick is to determine what pages are the most visited, and inject those with a dose of freshness. If a page is regularly viewed throughout the year, it may not need any work, but a quick nip and tuck here and there can keep it fresh and wonderful for the clicks that are surely coming. You can also use the pages that are viewed the most to send traffic to your less viewed sites that you also refreshed, thus helping your website in more than one way.

Of course, the general rule applies here as well, if it isn’t relevant anymore or you don’t need it for any reason, delete it: it might hurt at first, but it’s better that way.

Squeaky Clean And Fresh

After you’ve done all the work making your site run smoothly, you can invest some time into making it look new again. You can always redo the design a little to make it look more up to date with the newest trends, or can put some work into some graphics that you made in five minutes 10 months ago. Remember, the key is that your website looks fresh, not different. You need to walk the fine line of cleaning and completely revamping it. So, just minor touches on the design, perhaps some new menus, a new column or a smarter search engine. Something interesting, new and cool. Your guests will notice your work, and praise you for it.

So, now that we’re done with our brooms and mops and everything, we can sit back and admire the new face of your old site, ready to tackle the problems of tomorrow. Just remember, you need to put a little work into your site for it to look amazing, so do that every now and then and your site will be the best that ever was.