How To Clean Your Blog: 10 Maintenance Tips

Is your blog starting to look cluttered and hard to read? Cleaning up your blog can make it easier to read and increase reader retention. Don’t make the mistake of having a site that pushes readers away. A little bit of tweaking and updating is all you need.

Adjust your Copyright

Make sure your copyright is up to date. If you have an old year, readers might look upon this negatively. It can also cause problems if your site protection isn’t up to date. Keep yourself covered and update your copyright date every new year.

Revamp your Content

Look over your about us page, contact page, and other pages. Make sure everything is up to date. Look through your blog posts and judge their relevancy. Are these posts telling your readers what you want them to know? Make necessary adjustments. Add update posts for past posts that need it. Keep your old content connected with your new content by linking back whenever you can.

Delete Holiday and Outdated Images

Don’t keep outdated images or links on the homepage, in the header, or in the sidebar. If the holidays are over, remove all the holiday-themed images. If you were promoting a contest that ended two months ago, remove the advertising for it. Outdated information makes your blog look neglected and uncared for.

Test your Links

Having links to outside sites and inside pages that are broken can cause a lot of problems. Readers will get frustrated when they can’t get where they want to go, and your content won’t be giving the information it’s promising. Check your links and make sure they are working. Check in content links as well as sidebar links to fix the usability of your site.

Set up Statistics

Do you have a way to look at the visitor statistics of your site? Set up a program with your site so that you can see how many visitors you get, where people are coming from, and what pages are most popular on your site. This information can help you make improvements that will increase your blog traffic.

Cut Out Spam

Spammy sites are unattractive and get rid of visitors and readers fast. Don’t over-clutter your blog with advertisements and other spam. Take off ads that don’t fit in with your site topic and those that lead to profane sites or scams. Stay away from flashy advertising whenever possible. Don’t be afraid to leave some extra space here and there. Pushing everything close together with no boarders or spaces makes a blog unreadable and hard to look at.

Update the Look

Does your blog look a little out-dated? Does it exemplify what it should? Make sure your theme is up-to-date and looks clean. If you choose a free theme, personalize it. Get a new header image that is unique to your blog. For example, if you have a blog about chocolate, instead of just a brown theme, add images of all sorts of chocolates and chocolate desserts to the header.

Clean Up your Categories

Do you have hundreds of categories? Too many categories starts to defeat the purpose. They should make finding information easier, not harder. If you notice some categories are very similar, push them together to minimize your number of categories and clean up the space on your site.

Add Surveys and Polls for Reader Feedback

Do you want to improve your site but find that it’s hard to know exactly what needs improvement? Ask your readers! If anyone is going to have ideas, they will. Set up a poll asking about site usability, looks, and content quality. You can also send surveys to individual readers, both new readers and long-time readers, asking them to answer some questions and give detailed feedback at the end.

Add More Content

Some websites and blogs are very thin. They don’t have a lot of content to keep readers interested. Others have a lot of information but could use more. If you want to make your blog a more useful resource, add more content. Add more helpful and detailed posts about your topic. Add new posts regularly to keep readers come back everyday for new content.

Cleaning up your blog is not only easy to do, it will improve your blog in many ways. You will keep readers, bring in new visitors, and have a more successful blog overall.

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