Website Management – Spring Cleaning for Your Business Website
It’s that time of year, when all of us get around to doing a bit of spring cleaning, and this ought to apply to your business website, also. It’s far too easy to permit this task go by the wayside, but the results of this is a gradual loss of visitors, a poor site reputation and even sales. While this can be a rather subtle way to poor performance, as you don’t normally see it happening, it’s still a very real problem.
So in the spirit of prevention, here are 5 ways for you to make a huge difference in how your sites appear, operate and prosper.
- How fast do your pages load? – You have under 10 seconds to load your page or most people will exit and head somewhere else. Some causes of slow loading pages are too many images, pages built mostly with Flash, and errors in your site code. This really is something you need to check into, as Google will penalize your site in the search rankings if your pages take a long time to load.
- Defunct products, programs, and links – Be sure and remove old products, programs and particularly links that are no longer pertinent. Nothing irritates a user more than going somewhere and finding they can’t get there or the item is unavailable. Dead links and 404 pages will even affect your search rankings, too.
- Stale content and old images – Likewise cull out text and images that are no longer applicable. Those great pictures from 2007 which feature people no longer working with you can probably be archived, don’t you think? People and search engines tend to be after fresh, current content!
- Refresh your social media – Make sure that your social media buttons not only link to your current social media sites, but that you are current with them.
- Fresh content – Nothing will help nearly as much as fresh, updated content, consisting of posts, videos, audios, and images. If you have posts on the first page of your blog that are older than a month, you really should rethink your content strategy.
Break out your virtual broom and start sweeping. Your visitors will thank you!