photo credit: Diamonddavej
Have you noticed the weather is finally starting to turn at last (well here in the UK, anyway!)?
The interminable stretch of dark nights, the bitter cold, rain, snow and misery of the season has suddenly shifted.
We’re getting daffodils and sunshine now, and I don’t know about you, but when this happens my thoughts suddenly turn to spring cleaning.
How the shift in season can help our blogs
We log owners have been busy over Winter.
We’ve kept our sites running smoothly, probably done a bit of research to find out how to optimise them, learned some new blogging skills in the long dark evenings, and used the lack of sunlight as a good prompt to stay indoors and work on our business.
All of this activity online can lead to a lot of ‘clutter’, though, too.
De-cluttering for blog satisfaction
Clutter for your blog can take a lot of different formats.
It can mean a host of spam in your folder that needs sorting through and emptying, old e-mails that need responding to at last and then filing, revamping our back-up or online storage solutions to make sure that they’re keeping our data safe.
It can mean finally going back to your static pages and seeing just how much content on there has evolved, become outdated or needs to be simply revamped and reissued to reflect new developments in your business.
De-cluttering is a really satisfying task.
You can allocate a day to your blog just as you do for your home, spring cleaning all of the obsolete content, updating images, re-structuring files and folders, and emptying deleted messages, spam folders and messages you have responded to.
You can take the time to view your site from the perspective of one of your customers, and regard it with fresh eyes to see if you have any improvements to make.
How to approach your blog Spring cleaning
It’s worth undertaking your Spring cleaning systematically, checking to see if you have any software updates you can make, if there have been any new developments over the winter months that could enhance your processes, reduce administration and make your site run more efficiently and effectively.
Once you’ve got to the bottom of your tasks for cleaning and ordering your site, put in place a few processes that can mean you stay on top of your administration for the season.
These simple tasks will make your blog run more efficiently, load more fluidly and show your customers that you are committed to keeping your site as clean, ordered and tidy as you do your home environment!
What do you do to keep your blog decluttered?
Please share your views in the comments below.
Andrew is a website builder and helps small businesses with their on-line presence…so they can grow their customer list and increase sales. That’s it! That’s what we do each and every day.
This is something I routinely do, deleting useless plugins, editing old posts etc. And I always find something to clean. 🙂
Sounds like you are on top of things, Andrea.
I tend to spring clean once a month rather than more often. Too busy!
Andrew
Hey Andrew nice post as usual, All the above tasks are perfomed by me every weekend. Because I won’t give any chance to my system to hang off, this will really effect our work. Specially bloggers like us.
Jason,
Weekends are great for this sort of thing. As I say above, I tend to do these sort of things monthly but you have got me thinking…
Andrew
Dear Andrew –
I never rely on my spam filter to weed out nonsense comments.
I do it at least once a week. It is amazong how much spam you pick up.
People are prety sneaky about positing something pretty long that does not look like spam until you read it.
Glad you are having some spring. Nowhere in sight in the midwest of the US.
Corinne
You are right…the email spammers are getting more clever each day.
Spring will arrive soon for you, I hope.
Andrew
Hi Andrew
The best thing I did was research and removed a lot of plug-ins that were not needed. I cannot believe how many plug-ins I had and how much they slowed down my site. Now my site is running a lot smoother. Thanks for your tips.
That’s great, Fred.
Those plugins can really mount up.
Andrew
Hey Andrew, I usually plan my work before starting. I always give preference to most important one, it goes on and in the end I perform the task which is least important. So I mostly cover all the above mentioned tasks regularly.
Sai
Sounds like you have the perfect approach. People would buy that!
Andrew
Hey Andrew, you have shared very simple and helpful tasks to run our websites smoothly.
I clean my blogs at the end of every month. Usually I update all WordPress plugins, delete spam comments, optimize the database and edit some old articles to make it more up to date and informative.
Plaban
Great approach – very similar to mine.
Andrew
You absolutely right again, Andrew. All bloggers need to take a day or two off from work (not working on the next post) and work upon cleaning the blog to make it faster and neater.
This might not be required if one takes care of all the unwanted files and folders from time to time.
Ambika
Every now and then I may find a new plugin that gets my attention to help speed things up. That’s when I get distracted!
Andrew
Andrew
What you say is very important…I understand that. BUT…I outsource this sort of thing. When it comes to technology I prefer those with the right skills work on my sites.
Steve
Steve
That’s a GREAT approach. And it keeps people like me in a job!
Andrew
Hey Andrew,
Nice post and Thanks for sharing this post with us. I really enjoyed this post while reading and Yes, we have to delete useless plugins and spam comments, editing our old post and many other important things regularly and also have to update our wordpress and many other important plugins if there is any update available.
yes, everyone should check that their old posts are something that only are occupying space on your blog. You should either try to promote them or to re-edit them. Removing unnecessary items shall also work!
Yogesh
You say: “Removing unnecessary items”. Like what? Please share!
Andrew
We often find that posts need updating/expanding/refreshing. Often when you write a post you may be in a hurry and not add all that you originally wanted. But it is better to get a decent post up than to necessarily get it perfected.
Tracy
You should never be in a hurry to get apost up – that says to me, the post won’t be that good. It’s better to wait, do some more work and publish later.
Andrew