Spring A Good Time To Clean Your Website

When I was younger I remember every spring my mother would go on a cleaning spree. Not just your average every day kind of upkeep, but she really did a thorough top to bottom power clean.

I am not nearly the clean freak that my mother is, but I thought spring cleaning can be a good motivator and a good time of year to do some website maintenance and cleaning too.

For the past couple of weeks I have been trying to go through and clean up the main part of this site. So far, I haven’t touched this WordPress blog area. I really should, but I have been spending so much time on the other area that I think it will have to wait until this fall or next spring.

Some of my posts and content on the main part of this site is around 5 years old now. I can’t believe it has been that long. Time sure flies by. Going through 5 years worth of content is not an easy task, and I have barely put a dent in it. Some of it I don’t even remember posting so it has been an interesting process.

I also upgraded that part of this site to a newer version of software, which is much more complex than upgrading WordPress. There is no such thing as pushing a little update/upgrade button. It is a 100% manual and time-consuming process.

Some of the note worthy things I found:

Short posts
I found several posts with less than 300 words. Some were actually less than 200 words. I didn’t count, but I would guess I deleted somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-25 of these. I don’t usually delete content, but since they were so short they really didn’t add too much value.

Irrelevant or not on topic content
I found several posts that were totally off topic, which really didn’t have anything to do with what I normally write about. Many of these were also very short with a low word count. I ended up deleting at least 10 of these.

Bogus and/or spammy members
Since that part of this site has a membership area I end up getting a lot of people joining, then they post spam links and disappear forever. I ended up suspending or removing 150+.

Broken or redirected links
When I went through some of my older tutorials I found quite a few links that no longer exist, which is too bad because some of them were really helpful. I found one link that went to a page that said security certificate expired. I used to link to MSN webmaster tools, but after they switched to Bing my original link didn’t work anymore. I guess MSN forgot to update or redirect it. I am sure I will eventually find many more once I get time to go through them.

News section
I have a news section that contained 83 updates, which were mostly about site news and assorted updates. Most of these were very short, and they also didn’t add much value. Some of them were no longer relevant either. So I deleted 80 of them so far. I might end up removing the remaining 3 eventually.

How much time have I spent on this?
I don’t know for sure. Probably too much. I really should go through more of the older content and posts yet, but man it sure is a lot of work.

So that’s what I have been doing the past couple of weeks. I have been meaning to work on this for a long time now, and I figured spring was a good time of year and reminder to do some cleaning. It has been interesting reading some of my old content to see what I wrote about years ago.

So what do you think? Do you do any kind of spring cleaning for your website?