5 ways to declutter your website
Whether you’re creating a new website or updating one, take some time to declutter and organize the content to make your website inviting.
Benefits of decluttering a website
Your website is an online marketing tool. It guides potential clients to the next step towards becoming a client. When you declutter your website, you:
Make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for
Give potential clients a sense of ease, inviting them to browse longer and find out more about you
Highlight content that’s important to your business
Give Google and other search engines new content to index and display in search results
Declutter your website by organizing text and removing outdated photos
Here are some techniques I use for decluttering websites. Some involve streamlining and updating written content and others open up the visual spaciousness of a website page.
1. Organize content into sections with headings.
Writing section and subsection headings with useful keywords and placing readable content under them is one of the best ways to organize your website pages. Pages with sections not only improve readability and scannability for readers, but they also help your website SEO. Google and other search engines weigh keywords in headings more heavily when they evaluate what the website page is about. Style these headings hierarchically with Heading 2 and Heading 3 designations. Reserve Heading 1 for the largest heading at the top of the page.
2. Convert long paragraphs into bulleted lists.
I learned this technique of creating bulleted lists when I was a technical writer at IBM, writing help documents that were concise and readable. Try breaking down a paragraph of four or five sentences into a short bulleted list. Add a relevant introductory sentence and section heading and you’ve made your content less dense on the page.
3. Edit out extraneous or repetitive content.
You may already “Edit Yourself” (I’m dating myself with that link) in other types of writing you do for emails and social media. The same techniques of removing “fluff” words and repetitive sentences apply here. You also want to avoid repeating paragraphs verbatim across multiple pages. Google discourages repeated content and will penalize your SEO if you’ve taken shortcuts to fill in content. For example, if you have a Home page that talks about your services, keep the descriptions short and persuasive. Then go into more detail on your Services page.
4. Add "white space" on the sides or around design elements.
Employing “white space” or “negative space” means you choose to leave parts of a page empty (which can have a white background or any other color). The reader feels this spaciousness as a sense of restfulness and elegance. You can add white space next to text or images or between sections or in margins. Pay attention to how the content and the white space flow on a page around the text and images. Avoid “trapping” white space where there is no obvious movement of the eye down the page. Also check that your design works on mobile; most white space is removed for mobile, but sometimes extra space remains and looks awkward on a narrow screen.
5. Remove old resources, expired links, discontinued services, and outdated photos.
Regular housekeeping on your website is a good practice. Broken links that go to expired content hurt your SEO. Old resources, discontinued services, and outdated photos leave an impression of a business that is inactive or neglected and discourages potential clients from finding out more.
Cleaning out your website to make all your good stuff easy to find is very rewarding. It may even lead you to cleaning out your closets (or not).
