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

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

So in the spirit of prevention, here are 5 ways for you to make a huge difference in terms of how your business website appears, operates and prospers.

1. How rapidly do your pages load? You have less than 5 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 really is something you want to check into, as Google will penalize your site in the search rankings if your pages take a long time to load. Check out PageSpeed Insights to see how fast your business website loads.
2. Old products, programs, links lurking – Make sure you remove any old product, programs and links that are no longer pertinent. 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 don’t help your search rankings, either.
3. Stale content and old images – Likewise cull out text and images that are no longer topical. Those awesome pictures from 2007 that feature people no longer working with you can perhaps be archived, don’t you think? People and search engines tend to be after fresh, current content!
4. 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.
5. Fresh content – Nothing will help as much as fresh, updated content, consisting 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.

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