Dedicate Time for Site Clean Up and Organization

Do you have a child with a perpetually messy room or a co-worker with a chronically cluttered desk?  Often times, seemingly disorganized people claim that they know where everything is in that mess.  Sometimes that turns out to be true.  However, a lot of times it’s not exactly accurate and even they struggle to find what they need.   Most company websites slowly accumulate content which gradually moves them to being that cluttered mess.  Dedicating scheduled time to organizing the materials on the website can ultimately drive more efficiency both in your digital marketing campaigns as well as your technical improvements.

A company’s website often serves as the central point of contact for all of its digital marketing channels.  As digital marketing reach and content grows, the website tends to organically expand to support those initiatives.  This expansion often creates an ungainly and disorganized set of files and folders that can be very difficult to maintain.

Many site owners use the same excuse as the messy child or co-worker, “I know where everything is”.  Even if that is true, it doesn’t account for that individual being unavailable or moving on to a different company or role.  It’s becoming less common for a single person to be the point person for all website activities.  Technical contacts and marketing partners also need access to the site for updates, upgrades, and integrations.  Sorting through cluttered file structures to accomplish tasks creates additional time and effort for every single initiative.

As a primary site owner it’s important to dedicate some time to review, organization, and retirement of the content on the website.  It’s likely to save you time personally but will save significant time for partners that don’t have as much visibility on how the site has grown.  The clean-up and reorganization can also be a clue as to whether your site’s navigation, which often mirrors file structure, could use some realignment.

Keeping your site as lean as possible with clean up initiatives sounds like a low priority item to most digital marketers.  And it is true that it can’t displace critical technical or digital marketing tasks.  That’s why it’s important to set a schedule so that it’s not perpetually on the back burner. 

This recurring clean-up process will make updates easier to complete because content is easier to find, current, and relevant.