It’s that time of year, when many of us get around to doing some spring cleaning, this also ought to apply to your small business website, as well. You need to do your website maintenance. It’s far too easy to let this task go by the wayside, but the results of this is a progressive loss of visitors, a poor site reputation and perhaps sales. Even though this can be a rather subtle way to weak performance, as you don’t normally see it happening, it’s still a very real problem.
Here are 5 simple actions you can take to do your website maintenance that can make a big improvement in the way your sites appear, operate and prosper.
5 Simple Actions to do Website Spring Cleaning
- Are your pages loading quickly? – It’s been said you have less than 10 seconds to load your page or most people will abandon and head for faster, greener pastures. If your website is image heavy, and loaded with flash, you may well need to optimize for faster performance. Furthermore, Google will penalize your site in the search rankings if your pages load too slowly.
- Defunct products, programs, and links – Be sure and remove old products, programs and especially links that are no longer applicable. Nothing frustrates a user more than heading someplace and finding they can’t get there or the item is not available. Dead links and 404 pages will also affect your search rankings, too.
- Old content and images – Likewise cull out stale, no longer relevant content and images. Your old pictures from your company picnic in 2007 might not be considered fresh content, which is what folks and search engines both want!
- Refresh your social media – Ensure that your social media buttons not only link to your current social media sites, but that you are current with them.
- More fresh content that rocks – There isn't anything you can do to help in this respect more than to inject a fresh dose of new, relevant to 2013 content! If you have content on the first page of your blog that is more than a month old, you definitely ought to be more active with your content strategy.
