Spring Cleaning Applies to Websites, Too!

Your Business’ Website: It’s Time to Do Some Spring Cleaning

Just like your home, your small business website also needs a spring-cleaning. It’s very easy to let things slide, and the consequence of that would be a steady decline in traffic, reputation and ultimately sales. This can be a very insidious way for you to lose traction with your site, as you don’t immediately see it taking place. But it’s very real, and will have very real results.

So in the spirit of prevention, here are 5 ways you can make a huge difference in terms of how your sites appear, operate and prosper.

1. Are your pages loading quickly? – It’s been said you’ve got less than 10 seconds to load your page or most people will abandon and head for faster, greener pastures. If your site is image heavy, and packed with flash, you may well want to optimize for faster performance. Moreover, Google will penalize your site in the search rankings should your pages load too slowly.
2. Old products, programs, links lurking – Be sure you remove any old product, programs and links that are no longer applicable. Almost nothing helps say 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 relevant content and images. Your old pictures from your company picnic in 2007 might not be what we might term fresh content, and that is what people and search engines both want!
4. Refresh your social media – Ensure that your social media buttons not only link to your current social media sites, but that you’re up to date with them.
5. More fresh content that rocks – There is nothing you can do to help in this respect more than to provide 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 need to be more active with your content strategy.

Break out your virtual broom and start sweeping. Your visitors will thank you!