Just like our homes need a good spring cleaning, you should also spring clean your blog. This is how we can keep our sites current, organized, and reader-friendly. Without these things, growth is tougher and sites become frustrating. Learn how to spring clean your blog and get a free printable checklist.
My first blog is a homemaking blog so you can likely guess what content I promote the most during the spring, spring cleaning. It’s a task that many dread but it can help get our homes clean and ready for spring. And those seasonal tasks really do need to be done.
Our blogs need a good “clean” from time to time as well. As someone that has been blogging for over a decade, I can tell you blogs can become a mess and overwhelming just like our homes when we don’t keep up with things.
Keeping our blogs up-to-date and clutter-free also helps our readers to find what they are looking for and use our sites more seamlessly. This helps keep people on our sites instead of them getting frustrated and leaving to get the information somewhere else.
How to Spring Clean Your Blog
Clean Up Your Homepage
Over the last decade, my blog has had many different looks. If you really want to see you can look Retro Housewife Goes Green up on Wayback Machine, I will warn you, it’s embarrassing!
The thing is over time the look of websites has changed. At one point the trend was colorful and fun blogs, now a more minimalist look tends to be preferred. We can forget to even look at our homepage much and over time it can look pretty dated.
Take some time to really look at your homepage, look on desktop and mobile. Are there things you don’t need anymore? Do you still like the look or is it time to change your theme?
Clean Up Your Sidebar
It can be tempting to throw lots of things into your sidebar, my old ones were quite a mess. However, if you have ads or hope to use ads you want a very clean sidebar.
One of the top-performing ads for most bloggers is a sticky sidebar ad because it moves with the reader. If your sidebar is cluttered it takes a long time for the reader to get to that ad as it’s usually at the bottom of the sidebar. The longer it takes for them to see the ad the less money you will earn.
For my sidebar, I usually have a short bio and my profile picture, small social media buttons, and maybe one other thing. On Retro Housewife Goes Green I have a small ad for my membership on my sidebar along with the other things and that’s all.
If you have a lot of affiliate banners in your sidebar, do some research to see if they are performing well, they likely aren’t. People are more likely to click on affiliate links in posts than a banner.
Don’t forget, your sidebar should be pushed down to the bottom of your site on mobile anyway. Most people likely won’t even see the sidebar so no need to have much there, slowing down your site, and possibly losing you money.
Review Your Plugins
Plugins are great, they help us add things to our site without having to have any coding skills. They can be a very useful tool to power your site. The only problem is that it’s easy to go overboard.
I recently purchased a blog to flip (grow and then sell for a profit), it has so many plugins! I should have counted but I believe it was over 30. I’m still working on removing some.
There isn’t a magic number of plugins you should have but you need to consider a few things when it comes to plugins.
- Is this plugin bringing value to my site?
- Is the creator of the plugin still providing updates? (out of date plugins can be a security risk!)
- Is the plugin slowing down my site?
- Can I use one plugin to do the job of multiple?
Once you ask these questions you should be able to reduce your plugins a bit. This will likely help your site speed and means fewer updates you need to do. If you have any paid plugins it could save you money as well.
Don’t forget to regularly update your plugins! This is not a task to save for spring cleaning your blog, this should be done at least monthly.
Check for broken links
Broken links are bad for SEO and also provide a bad user experience. Unfortunately, they will happen, pages are deleted and URLs change. That’s why you want to make sure you are checking your links.
Don’t worry you don’t have to manually check every link! You can use a free site to check for broken links, use a broken link plugin, or you can use Semrush and the site audit tool. I like the use Semrush because I can check for other site errors at the same time.
I highly recommend getting a free trial of Semrush while you are spring cleaning your blog. It has a lot of tools that can help you check to make sure your site is running as well as it should.
Update About & Contact Pages
You want to make sure that your about and contact pages are up-to-date. You don’t want someone to try and contact you only to find your email address no longer works or your contact form is broken.
I strongly encourage you to have your actual email address on your blog contact page. A lot of people don’t want to use a form, especially brands. It’s a big pet peeve of mine to have to search for an email address on a blog or have to use a form. I want to have the sent email so that I have a reminder of what I sent.
And when looking at your about page you want your readers, and possibly even brands, to be able to see quickly what you and your blog are all about. Our blogs can shift and change over time and our about pages should as well.
Sort Your Tags & Categories
My categories and tags were out of control last year when I was cleaning up my own blog. I knew nothing about site structure when I was starting out and it got pretty overwhelming.
By contrast, I knew what I was doing when I started this site and it has just 5 categories and only 2 tags. While especially tags will increase as the site builds, you do only want to have the categories and tags that are still serving your site.
If you aren’t sure the best way to set up your tags and categories I recommend checking out Crystal Clear SEO. It’s a really great SEO course that is easy to follow and affordable. There is a whole video on tags and categories that is really useful for figuring out how to organize everything.
Delete Old Drafts
I have a lot of ideas for my blog, as I’m sure many of you do. I tend to keep mine in a spreadsheet on Airtable but I have the odd draft here or there that I started and never finished.
Review these and if they are posts you still want to make, do it. Get it on your content calendar and write the post. If that idea no longer is serving you then just delete the draft.
Review Your Old Content
Writing new content is a great way to grow your blog but you don’t want to forget about the old content either. Google loves when we keep our content up-to-date and it’s better for your readers as well.
For most of my blogs, I’ve reached the point where I spend as much time, if not more, updating old content as I do making new content. I keep learning so I can keep improving my old posts.
There are a few things I do to find old content I want to update.
- Find posts will low page views. At least a couple of times a year I like to see what posts are getting little to no traffic.
- Find posts that have dropped in rankings.
- Find posts that are on pages 2-3 of Google.
- Review seasonal content.
With low page view posts, I figure out if they still belong on my site or can I improve them. There are mixed opinions if you should delete posts but I tend to feel like even from just an organizational standpoint if a post is not serving my readers or blog that it’s better to just delete it.
With posts that have dropped in ranking, I like to do a deep dive into why. Sometimes a bigger site has posted about the topic, sometimes it just needs to be updated, and sometimes it’s hard to know. Once I have an idea of why, I see how I can improve my content to get it ranking higher again.
Posts that are on pages 2-3 of Google are good to find because those are the ones that will help you the most to improve their rankings. Again you will want to review their SEO and make any improvements you can.
Work on your ORPHANED Content
So what is orphaned content? Orphaned content is your content that doesn’t have any links from other posts or pages on your site. This makes it hard for your readers to find and also hard for Google to find.
This is another time that Semrush is useful. If you have Semrush or have the free trial of Semrush you can use their site audit tool to find your orphaned content so you can work on linking to it within your site.
There are other ways to find your orphaned content but Semrush makes it really easy and there are so many other tools you can use that it makes sense to use it while doing some spring cleaning.
Update Your Media Kit
If you want to do any sponsored work a media kit is essential. It’s also important to keep it updated. I try to update mine about once a quarter. I use a template in Canva so it’s really easy to go in and update it.
You can get my media kit template for free so it can be a really easy task for you as well. If you are already tracking your stats, and you should be, it will take almost no time at all for this task.
Get the Free Checklist
Don’t forget to download your free checklist with all of these tasks plus some space to add your own tasks. It will help you remember what you need to get done and have you done with this chore in no time.
Spring Cleaning Summary
This was a long post so if you are a skimmer here is the TL;DR of the post. You can also save this post to go back to if you get hung up on a task. Or set up a 1-on-1 coaching session with me and I can help you spring clean your blog.
- Clean your homepage.
- Clean your sidebar.
- Review your plugins.
- Check for broken links.
- Update your about page and contact page.
- Sort your categories and tags.
- Delete old drafts.
- Review your old content.
- Work on orphaned content.
- Update your media kit.
Don’t forget to get your free trial of Semrush it will make several of these tasks much easier and help you find anything else you may need to add to your spring cleaning list.
More Blogging Resources to Check Out
- How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing
- How to Always Have Blog Post Ideas
- How to Get Started With Email Marketing
- How to Prepare Your Blog for Q4
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