7 Blog Spring Cleaning Tips

A blog is like your home or place of business on the Web. If you neglect to keep it clean, it can make you miserable and unproductive. Now and then, observe the rules of virtual spring cleaning and get off to a fresh start for the times ahead.

1) Delete your weakest blog posts.

Unsuccessful or weak posts are those that do nothing but take up space in your blog. They aren’t the best examples of your writing; your visitors have no use for them; search engines don’t like them; you don’t make money from them. So what are they doing there still?  You could keep them around just in case… But personally, I delete what I have no use for as time permits.  For example, in my Facebook and Internet marketing blog, I’ve removed many older posts or at least revamped their content.

Look over your article inventory and get rid of what needs to go. If they get no traffic, no backlinks and no earnings, there’s nothing to lose. You would have to update any links (your internal links) to those posts, or else redirect those links to similar, better posts. I’ve deleted posts and redirected their URLs to other articles without any loss in traffic.

NOTE: I don’t recommend deleting a ton of old posts at once!  For safety reasons, do it gradually, like maybe one post for every five new articles you publish. This way the total size of your blog won’t change significantly in the eyes of search engines.

2) Update obsolete articles and information.

For example, say you wrote a review on free webmaster tools. If a service becomes unavailable or no longer free, you’d want to update the article. But how will you know? You can’t always check on these no matter how vigilant you are. This is where your visitors could really help.  Often they’ll be the first to know about outdated or missing information in your articles. So enable comments in your posts so they can share their knowledge with you. However it is your responsibility to keep your contact details and other details your blog current.

3) Check for broken links.

Broken or dead links occur when the external page you go to is gone or unavailable, or when you delete or change the URL of your own posts. Broken links may also happen when visitors submit invalid URLs in their comment info. Lots of broken links tell visitors that a blog isn’t

well-cared for. You could also lose traffic if they are internal links. Use a link checker to make sure all your outbound and internal links alike are current. In WordPress, the easiest way to do this is with a link checker such as the Broken Link Checker plugin.

4) Close comments on old posts.

I don’t know about you, but if I see a three-year old post with 500 comments in it – a lot of it spam – I’d say it’s time to stick a fork in it.  I’d do this with posts when the newer comments are becoming irrelevant or if the post itself is outdated.  In WordPress, you can manually close comments for individual posts, or tell WordPress to disable comments after a fixed period.

5) Delete unused resources.

Do you have blog templates that you never plan to use? Do you have photos in your image gallery that you won’t need? What about deactivated plugins? Uninstall these unused themes and plugins, and delete surplus images. You won’t miss them. It would make your blog interface cleaner and tighter, and it would also save on Web hosting space.

6) Hide or disable unnecessary widgets.

Newbie bloggers are easily taken with widgets. If you have gotten over this trap (and hopefully, you have), it’s time to trim them to a reasonable amount. A surplus of fancy widgets can slow down your blog, distract visitors and just plain make you look ridiculous. Remove unnecessary items and consider using tabbed widgets to save space. You can find WordPress plugins for those if you can’t make them yourself. You must use a theme that supports tabbed widgets.

7) Empty the Trash, Drafts and Spam folders.

Akismet (an anti-spam plugin) can weed out 99% of spam, but it won’t delete them for you. Make sure you empty your trash and spam folders on a regular basis. This isn’t just for comments though. It’s also for your own posts– discarded posts, abandoned or forgotten drafts, rejected guest posts — you get it.  If you don’t use ’em, lose ’em.

Conclusion

Spring cleaning is an important part of website upkeep. It’s normal to be reluctant– we get attached to old articles and habits just as we do to furniture and belongings, even when we don’t need them anymore. Take your time. Just keep in mind that cleaning up is better for your blog in the long run.

A word of caution: Make a full backup of your blog and database before you make changes to it like the above. If you accidentally delete something you need, restore your backup. Also, I prefer to do this over a period of days or weeks, while continuing to produce fresh content for my blog.