Many homeowners or renters experience clutter after being in one place for too long. You don’t want to throw something away because you might need it, things get lost in the back of the closet or under the bed, and after a while the clutter gets to be so much that it’s tough to know where to even begin the de-cluttering process. Oddly enough, this exact same thing can happen to a website. Although it may seem much smaller than a home or even just a room, a website can also be quite large in a different way. Websites can have hundreds of pages, thousands of links, and tons of pictures. When all is said and done, a website has quite a bit of room for someone to clutter up.
Fortunately, cleaning up a blog is easy. Many blog owners get nervous that changing a blog will cause him/her to lose valuable information, but this is usually not the case. Just as in a house, you can clean it up without throwing anything away. It is all about organization. It will help your visitors navigate your site easier and thus will hopefully only improve your blog traffic.
Top 5 Ways to Clean Up Your Blog
You should sit down and spend an entire day cleaning up your blog. Although it is a bit time consuming, most find that it is a fun and easy activity. Consider some of the ways you can clean up your blog:
1. Web Design Features/Layout – Sometimes the layout and format of the blog is causing it to look cluttered. When you were first starting a business or starting your blog, you likely wanted it all—calendar, tweet log, recent posts, every single social networking button, etc.—but this isn’t all necessary. This can cause a blog to look too busy, so it’s a good idea to spend some time going back and getting rid of features that you never use.
2. Unnecessary Pages – Many blogs have many different categories and many different pages displayed on the homepage. Go through and see how many of these categories you actually use. Many are surprised to find that some pages are filled with just one article. Try and fit all of your articles into fewer categories and try to eliminate any other pages that are unnecessary. If you have a “write for us” page and a “guest post” page, it’s time to combine them.
3. Unnecessary Links – Older blogs are usually filled with links, and in most cases these links are dead. Not only do a bunch of links give your blog a cluttered look, but they give your blog a bad reputation if they don’t even work. You don’t want your visitors continually clicking dead links and losing focus, so go through and delete these links.
4. Colors and Pictures – This is usually the easiest fix for a blog. If your theme has a very busy background and is filled with huge pictures, it’s going to be overwhelming for a reader. This gives your blog the illusion of being cluttered even if it is not. Consider getting a simpler background and see how it looks.
5. Old Content – One easy way to de-clutter your blog is to go through all of your old content. If you’re finding that your blog is full of now irrelevant articles, you may want to either delete them or take them off of your homepage. It is also a good idea to close comments on these old and irrelevant posts to avoid spammers and clutter. You can learn more about closing comments here.
It is important for a blog owner to remember that content does not have to be lost just because you are reorganizing the blog, and visitors will not get confused over a major re-structure. Although you will have to announce to your loyal readers that your site is undergoing maintenance, many will be able to adapt because you are organizing. This will overall make your blog easier to navigate and more enjoyable to read.
Photo Credit: simplyzesty.com
Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to VoIP service. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including document software to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business directory, Business.com.
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Your style is really unique compared to other people I’ve read stuff from. Many thanks for posting when you’ve got the opportunity, Guess I’ll just bookmark this site.
Thank you so much! Hopefully more to come. Looking forward to your future comments
A big mistake that so many new bloggers do is that when they install WordPress for example, they forget about the “Sample-Page” and the “Uncategorized” category that comes as default in WordPress, this not only makes their blog looks bad and unprofessional but it also causes problems in search engines because if these 2 entries get indexed and then you try to remove them later, the search engine gets a 404 error.
So the best thing to do is always remove unwanted pages, categories or tags from your blogs if you don’t need them anymore as soon as possible.
This will not only help clean up your design but also the way your blog gets crawled.
I absolutely agree. WordPress definitely gives you some default pages to help make things easier, so these should either be changed or deleted. Making sure your blog gets crawled is incredibly important, so removing these unwanted pages and categories is crucial. Thanks for the advice!
My kids closets are rellay small and can get out of control. I have to go through them every few months. Kids grow so fast! My kids love donating old clothes and toys that they have out grown. We usually donate them to family and friends that have younger kids. Thanks for the great tips!
Nice post, It is a truth nobody have any time to wait much more to load any web page. so a fast loading webpage has always a edge over others. Besides Google also rewards fast loading pages.
Hello Amanda,
The most strong way for cleaning up the clutter is to remove unnecessary widgets which are related to traffic view or which shows number of online visitors. I have seen hundreds of website with the same issue, which reduces the loading speed as well.
I definitely agree (and it’s such an easy fix). Thanks for reading!
Damn, my blog isn’t well organized at all.Lot of clutter around.Thanks for the wonderful write . Will soon implement your tips.Thanks
Great post! In addition to these 5 important points, I have also cleaned up the footer section of my blog. I removed the links to WordPress (though I love it so much) and links to login page etc.
Yes that’s a great idea as well. I think the footers are where a lot of people put the clutter that they don’t know what to do with, but a footer is still a part of your website! Thanks for reading =)
Straight-forward, to-the-point write up… Congrats!
GREAT point! There is nothing more annoying for a reader than waiting for a page to load. I’ll admit that I’m guilty of clicking off a page just because the load time is too long. Thanks for reading!