Today is Pack Rat Day and even though the suggestions for celebrating this ‘holiday’ is to continue to be a pack rat, I thought we could celebrate a different way.
As a self-proclaimed pack rat, I understand the feeling of need to keep things, whether it’s a pair of scissors in every drawer so they’re always within reach, or the papers I wrote in college in case that knowledge will come in handy again someday, or photography magazines that I can use as inspiration if I ever looked through them. I try not to let the pack rat in me come out in my professional life, but sometimes it’s not as easy as I’d like.
If you’re a pack rat like me, the one place you need to resist the urge is on your website. So to celebrate today’s holiday, let’s take a look at how to keep your website organized and clutter-free.
Keep Website Files Organized
When I design the header images for the Sparkfactor blog, I usually go through several iterations. Ordinarily, I know which version is best, but other times I can’t quite decide, so I upload two to the page, see them side by side, and then choose. What happens, though, is that I don’t delete the unwanted one from the File Manager in our software, creating more and more files on the server and in the software that aren’t necessarily being used.
Action item: delete unused images, documents, and files to keep the backend of your site up-to-date.
Once the necessary files are the only ones that are in your website, make sure you can find buy cheap priligy uk what you’re looking for at a moment’s notice. In WordPress, it’s easy to add tags to images to help you search when necessary. In HubSpot, you can use files to distinguish between groups of images and documents. It’s especially important to do this if several people on your team are frequently making adjustments on the website. When everything is easier to find, it takes less time to accomplish tasks and everyone knows where to find what they want.
Action item: organize content to make it easy to find.
Simplify the User Experience
Websites often have pages that aren’t visited by consumers on a regular basis or even at all. These pages could be taking up valuable real estate on navigation that could be better utilized with pages that are more relevant for potential customers, or they could be pages targeted for bottom of the funnel users where ready-to-buy consumers visit before clicking on the demo button. Discover which pages are diamonds in the rough and which are weighing the site down.
Action item: Use Google Analytics or HubSpot’s Page Performance to look at what pages are underperforming.
After looking at which pages are pulling the least amount of viewers, determine how those pages should be working for you and think critically about how and why a visitor would both visit and leave the underperforming pages. The priority is to get your visitors to where they need to be on your website as quickly and easily as possible. A contact page, for example, might have a high bounce rate, which could be because people only want to find the address or phone number for your business. But a high bounce rate on a service page might indicate a disconnect between what is on the page and what a visitor is looking to find.
Action item: decide whether to revise the page, merge with better performing pages, or remove altogether to help the user have a better site experience.
It’s hard work not to let images and files stack up and muddle your website, so to keep on top of the potential mess it’s important to keep these four steps in mind on a routine basis. In fact, writing this post has made me go back into the Sparkfactor website and clean up unused files and organize what’s left. Happy spring cleaning!
Need to declutter even more? Download our free 10 Useless Things to Cut From Your Marketing ebook to learn how to make your marketing strategy run more efficiently.
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