Regular readers will know I’m a true believer in perfection and bulletproofing. Removing things that aren’t important is vital to make sure your website is converting as well as possible. If you have links going away from your website or you have any distractions, this is ultimately another reason why someone may not buy something from you or click your adverts. If you could remove things that don’t benefit your website, you would delete them right? Good, then read this post!

Things You Should Remove From Your Website

Remove Dead Links

A post you did over a year ago, could more than likely have a link in it that no longer work. Websites come and go and there is no point linking to a website that no longer exists, it’s unprofessional and is probably losing you money. I use a tool called Broken Link Checker, it crawls your website and lets you know where there are broken links and will allow you to edit them or remove them.

Remove Unused WordPress Plugins

A friend told me that WordPress plugins slow down your website, it’s not a huge deal but when you have 30 like I do, it all adds up. Yesterday I removed 8 unused WordPress plugins and it decreased my website load time by over a second. Don’t just do it for the speed, it’s also a safety concern having old, unused plugins on your website.

Linking To Tag’s Isn’t Important

You can only take around 99.9% of my word on this one but recently while browsing a few websites in my industry I noticed none of them linked to their tags at a bottom of a blog post. I Skyped my SEO guy and asked him about it and he said you don’t need to link to them in every post, just have them in your sitemap and that will do. Search engines can crawl your site and find your tag pages that way instead. This means you can use that space to either get more subscribers or make more money.

Update Your Autoresponder Series

In business, things rarely stay the same, what was working last year, may not work today. When someone subscribes to my list they get a free gift, after that I automatically send them emails every so often, mentioning old posts on my website and products I think they should buy. Sometimes over time, posts become irrelevant or affiliate promotions may no longer convert as well as they did. When this happens, change the email to promote something else. To manage IncomeDiary’s mailing list and autoresponder series, I use Aweber.

Stop Featuring Things People Don’t Care About

Recently I ran a test on my website using CrazyEgg. It shows me where on the page people are clicking and looking. Using this information I can tell what people are really interested in and also, what people aren’t interested in. I have removed links in my navigation and elements on my sidebar and homepage. Removing things will mean readers will have less choice and distractions. This also gives you a great opportunity to add something new and can often increase your earnings by quite a bit.

Social Media Buttons

This is a controversial one but I don’t believe that there is any real benefit to having a tweet button on your website, even Facebook like buttons in most circumstances aren’t worth the real-estate. What I did was have a Tweet button on my website, I tracked how many people tweeted in the last 7 days across my whole website using Twitter and using a Tweet Button. Over 500 people used Twitter directly, no one, not one person used the button. This experiment may of not been the most scientific thing in the world but it was good enough for me.

Before I get a whole load of readers  (ok, maybe 3) suggesting that I’m wrong. Yes I’m sure there is a small percent of people who like those buttons and use them. But in my experience it’s not the big guys, not the guys who can send you the traffic. I find them ugly and ineffective. There is also nothing worse then a Tweet button on your website that has 7 tweets, your content is worth more than that and it will only make you look not as good as you really are.

Are Contact Pages Important?

Let me firstly say, in some industry, yes they are! But on IncomeDiary, no they are not. The only emails I use to get from my contact form was spam, people wanting me to promote them and people asking for help. I hate spam, I don’t promote rubbish and people asking for help, guess what? The answer is on my website. It was a drain on my time having all the emails come in, occasionally something good or important came along but really, if someone needs to get a hold of me that bad, they find a way. Although this doesn’t make me really any more money, it does save me A LOT of time. I highly recommend this to anyone getting a lot of email.

Here’s what I recommend you do if your like me and want to reduce all that support. Link to your contact page on your about page or in the footer of your website, not in the header.

Sidebar and Footer Opt-ins

Yet again, quite controversial. You see, the majority of people will subscribe via your Popup Domination lightbox if you have the settings right. The rest can subscribe via your squeeze page that we set up using OptimizePress. Only around 5 or so percent will actually use the sidebar or footer opt-in. I personally prefer to use that same space for adverts instead as it gives me a higher return. Also if you think about it this way, at the bottom of your blog post, say you have a subscribe box, 98% of people have already opted in or decided they don’t want to, it means having that box is irrelevant to those people, however if you have an advert, it’s not irrelevant to anyone.

Redirect Old Removed Web Pages

We all do it, we create pages, link to them and then remove them for one reason or another. Redirection WordPress plugin allows you to find these pages and redirect any readers who go to those pages.