5 Easy Ways to Spruce Up Your Site

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5 Ways to Spring Clean Your Website

Just like your home, your small business website also requires a yearly spring-cleaning. It’s very easy to let things slip, and the results of that would be a steady decline in traffic, reputation and consequently sales. This is a rather insidious way to lose traction with your website, as you don’t immediately see it occurring. But it’s quite real, and can have very real results.

Here are 5 simple things you can do that can make a big difference in the way your sites appear, operate and prosper.

  1. How quick do your pages load? – You have less than 10 seconds to load your page or the majority of people will exit and head somewhere else. Some reasons for slow loading pages are too many images, pages built mostly with Flash, and errors in your site code. This is something you want to check into, as Google will penalize your site in the search rankings if your pages take too long to load.
  2. Old products, programs, links lurking – Make sure you remove any old product, programs and links that are no longer pertinent. Almost nothing says your page is stale and dated more than your PDF download from 2008 that’s not only dated but unavailable. Dead links and 404 pages will also not help your search rankings, either.
  3. Old content and images – Likewise cull out stale, no longer topical content and images. Your old pictures from the company picnic in 2007 may not be what we might term fresh content, and that is what folks and search engines both want!
  4. Social media – Make sure that your social media buttons not only link to your current social media sites, but that you are up to date with them. Pinterest and Instagram are later entries that may not be displayed with your social buttons.
  5. Fresh content – Nothing will help nearly as much as fresh, updated content, in the form of posts, videos, audios, and images. If you’ve got posts on the first page of your blog that are over the age of a month, you might want to rethink your content strategy.

It’s spring, and time to get about cleaning. You’ll be glad you did!