A website is a digital storefront of your business and people are willing to do business with appealing sites and not with the sites that have a poor design or less loading speed. A website when developed seems really lightweight, but as time goes on you add new media, plugins, themes, and codes which often make your website speed low. No doubt, add-ons and plugins increase the efficiency of your site but often makes it slow.
What is wrong with a cluttered website?
When a website is cluttered, it affects the overall size of the website and takes time to load. A site that takes more than 2 seconds to load frustrates a user and makes him switch from your site. So, it is required to update and maintain your website.
Here are the reasons that trigger you to clean your website. However, before you jump into de-cluttering your site, it is important to run a full backup of your website to restore back to the working website.
Clean up media files:
A website will always have a filled media library. Images that are no more in use also stays in the media library which increases the overall size of the website. Be wise and remove unnecessary files to let your website to remain smooth.
Take a step by step approach,
- Go into your WordPress Media Library.
- Remove the media that are not being used on your website.
- Add a plugin named “Media Cleaner” and remove the media files that are not used on your website.
- Add the deleted items in the temporary folder of media cleaner so that you can approve or deny the deletion later.
Why use Media Cleaner?
Removing each image manually consumes a good amount of time whereas media cleaner helps to remove all the unused media on your website. It has internal trash that temporarily stores trash files and lets you check them later so that they can be deleted permanently.
Note: Before using a media cleaner, make sure to have a backup before you start deleting files.
Filter unnecessary themes and plugins:
Adding a bunch of plugins and themes look super exciting and upgrade your website efficiency, but they might be of no use in the long run. Some of the resources can benefit your website, but other unnecessary plugins strain your website. It is a significant part to clean your website by removing unwanted plugins that slow down your website speed.
Optimize images:
Websites are never without images. Every time images are uploaded they take space on your site, it is not only important to remove unnecessary images, but it is necessary to compress and optimize all the images on your website. If you already have images on your website, it may be difficult and time taking for a custom web designer to optimize every single image process, therefore, get some image optimizer tool to make the task quickly. Image optimizer smushes and shrinks the overall size of the image to make them load faster.
What are the best tools to optimize images?
- JPEG Optimizer
- Image recycle
- Kraken.io
- Smush it
Optimize web content:
A good content differentiates your website from the masses and delivers the right message to the hearts and minds of your customers. Reviewing content on a website can be tiring so the best way is to ask some pretty simple questions to yourself that will identify the flaws in the content so you can change it.
- Is your content fresh/ when was the last time you updated your content?
- Is the content readable?
- Does the web content serve a purpose to the readers?
Buzz your content team if you find that the content is not updated and rewrite it. Spend some time updating and revising content. It will take time to revamp web content, but fresh content inspires the readers and eventually gets you more traffic.
Test functionalities:
When you have an online storefront, you have to make sure that each of your online processes works well. It includes all the web forms, selection process adding to cart to the checkout process. Fill out the web forms of your site and check that the process is simple, intuitive and most importantly functional. Finding a web bug means your web users have a bad user experience which accounts to low conversions. Fix the bugs and look for ways you can smooth the process.
Discussed above are some main rules that need to be followed step by step because a website requires routine maintenance after being launched. Check and update the contact information that includes email addresses, contact number, and social media accounts to stay connected with your customers. Moreover, you can check for bugs, complicated codes, and other elements to keep your website fresh and updated.