How to keep your website fit in 2012
JAN 2, 2012: Over time websites inevitably become bloated. Pages are published and stored on servers, and even if they’re not appearing on your site, you can bet Google is still indexing them. So how can you ensure your website stays lean and delivers the best user experience in 2012?
Keep content active
The only content on your website should be active content, which is selling current products or services. If an offer expires delete it. If you have stopped selling a product don’t keep it there just because someone bought it in the past. If you have a support section, use it to archive old information.
Stop storing
Google doesn’t care if a document or file is private, confidential or internal. To keep things clean, avoid storing non customer-facing information on your website, as google will index it. Save this for the intranet, or if you need to share files with people outside your organisation, try services like yousendit or dropbox. Clutter will not benefit you or your users, or your search results.
Set a date and stick to it
The last thing you want is visitors stumbling across out of date information. Simple things like financial results, employee numbers or the name of your CEO, need to be right. To ensure they are, set up regular intervals for checking essential information. The more time critical, the more frequently it should be checked. If you have a CMS system with ‘reminder’ settings use them.
Suggested timeframe:
- 3 months: Core stats, facts and figures about your company
- 6 months: Product listings, specifications and features
- 12 months: Footers, terms of use and disclaimers
Consider page ranking and traffic
Before you delete anything from your site, check how it is ranking and how much traffic it is generating. If Google is ranking it well, then you might want to consider refreshing the content on the page, rather than deleting it. If no one has visited the page in the last 3-6 months, it’s time to go.
Balance accuracy with credibility
There is no doubt that information can add credibility, but too much information can have the opposite effect and could clog up your search results. Media releases are a good example. Many companies store media releases going back five or ten years. This is a great internal resource, but visitors are most interested in the news of the day. Store media releases older than a year or two on your intranet and add any important historical information to your ‘about us’ or ‘history’ pages.
Kill it for good
Google stores pages in its cache. If you don’t want people clicking through to pages you have removed, you will need to kill the page in Google’s cache. This video is probably the easiest way to explain how:
Handle your URLs
If search engines or other sites still link to pages you have deleted, this will dramatically affect your site’s user experience. Ensure you redirect these links to alternate pages so that your visitors aren’t greeted by 404 ‘Page not Found’ messages.
Create a policy
Deleting content is never easy. In fact, it’s a lot easier to keep it than kill it. Establish a simple set of criteria to determine what to keep and delete. Date, accuracy and number of page visits (in the last six months) are the easiest places to start.
