Day 2: Spring Cleaning Your Website

Today we’ve got some tips and tricks to help you Spring Clean your website.

  1. Pages
    The pages on your website should be the main info that anyone visiting needs to know to find out who you are, what you do and how you can help them. Anything beyond that is generally fluff and can be removed. It may be content that can be used in blog posts, which are less of a permanent fixture on your site. All of the elements of your website can be decluttered and streamlined, and combining the effects of a clearout on each of these will lead to massive improvements.
  2. Posts
    Those posts we mentioned can also, in some cases, be cleared out and cleaned up. Less content makes it easier for people to find what they are looking for. NOTE: if you are removing a page or a post you MUST set up a 301 redirect to tell Google where to send traffic that may still be looking for that page – either from a saved bookmark or from Google’s own index before it is updated. Not doing this can damage your SEO efforts.
  3. Media
    All of those images and files you upload can cause a massive amount of bloat on your site, slowing it down and taking up server space (which is costing you money!). Be careful in doing a mass clearout here, though, as if you remove an image that is used on a page or post, it will cause a dreaded “broken image”. If you are unsure then settle for using an image optimisation tool to reduce the file sizes of your images (especially if they have been uploaded from a good quality camera as the resolution will be much higher than necessary).
  4. Plugins
    Check you need them all and remove anything that is no longer serving you. We all try these things out and forget to remove them, do yourself a favour and clean this list up. If you are not sure, check with whoever built your site to make sure a plugin isn’t being used somewhere so that you don’t break anything!
  5. Themes
    You need the current one, a parent one if it’s a child and a backup/default one just in case. Delete the rest. As well as causing bloat these will look to be updated even if they are not in use. Who has time for that!?
  6. Links
    Not necessarily a clearout, but make sure links on your site are working. Broken links are frustrating for users and can also hurt your SEO score.
Social Media-Spring Clean Week
02 February 2021
Andrea @ Coppertops

Andrea @ Coppertops

I help small Irish businesses get found online with clear websites, simple marketing, and tech that behaves itself.

Work with me your way:
done‑for‑you if you want it handled,
done‑with‑you if you want a partner,
or do‑it‑yourself with a helping hand.

Through Chemistry Calls, website builds the Coppertops way, and the Nurture IT membership, we make digital feel doable.

Expect straight answers, tidy systems, and gentle encouragement to press publish. Empowering people to do what they thought they couldn’t is my favourite part of the job.

My background is a path from Chemistry to Computer Science to Web Technology, where I found strong feelings about building websites that work rather than just look pretty. Adding marketing, design and strategy skills to that technical foundation means that at Coppertops we build your website to work for your business and to visually represent you online - a site that you can love and feel proud to share!