Step one: Evaluate what you have and if you still need everything

Are there any things on your website that are not relevant anymore? Think about sales-pages for offers that have expired, special promotions you have been running in the past, or maybe even freebies you no longer want to offer. If you find any of these, you need to either delete them or remove them for people to see or stumble upon accidentally.

I would suggest you don’t delete the content, as you might want to re-work it in the future. And hiding content is actually pretty easy.

1. In your wordpress dashboard, navigate to the blog post / page you want to hide
2. Under the “Publish” Tab on the right, you can either change the status to “unpublished” or change the visibility to “private”
3. Make sure you remove any links and references etc. in other blog post / on other pages that lead to the content you want to hide. Don’t forget references that might hide in your sidebar or your navigation

Step two: Is everything still working as intended?

Once you got rid of all things that you don’t longer need, it’s time to check if what you have is still working. Test your links, especially all of them on the front-page. Is everything in your menu still working? What about your sidebar (if you have one)? 

This would also be a good opportunity to check if your forms are still working properly – can people subscribe to your list, does your contact form still work correctly? Do all automations work as intended? This is especially important if you have any automations for your sales pages in place.

Step three: Is everything still up to date?

This is more a technical thing than anything else. Make sure all your plugins and your theme are updated. THE NO1 vulnerability of wordpress is outdated software – and it’s such an easy fix to eliminate this threat by making sure all your plugins, your WordPress core and your theme are up to date.

Bonus: Take a backup

Now that your website is all fresh and clean, it would be a great moment to make a backup of your WordPress installation and your files. You can either do this by using one of the many backup plugins or you do this directly in your cpanel via your web hosting service. 

I would even recommend that you do update & backup as regular maintenance tasks at least once a month, once a week would even be better.

Other digital spring-cleaning ideas

If you’re not getting enough from spring-cleaning and are ready to tackle it all in true Kondo-style, you can also

1. Unsubscribe from any newsletters that aren’t interesting anymore
2. Check your own email-subscribers and clean out the inactive ones (I know, this one takes a lot of courage, but why keeping people in the loop that are not interested in you or your work anymore?)
3. Unfollow people on Social media that either won’t bring you joy anymore or that don’t interact with you at all (I’m looking at you here, follow-for-follow!)

Which one of these steps will you implement to spring-clean your website? Let me know in the comments!

Sending you love, sparkles & pixiedust