Three tips for cleaning up a messy website

Working in industries like higher education, nonprofits, and health care, we see many large-scale websites that serve internal and external audiences. We also see a lot of duplicate content and general inefficiencies on these sites, usually stemming from years of updates by multiple teams or from contributors who needed something added in a pinch. These edits are typically made as temporary solutions that end up being less than temporary. 

In this article, we’ve provided three steps to “Marie Kondo” your website and make it more beneficial to your key audiences and more efficient overall — and worthy of top-of-page ranking. 

1. Take inventory.

No doubt you’ve heard the phrase “Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better.” This is how starting a web audit often feels, but don’t let that deter you. When you thoroughly audit your website before you start making adjustments, you can make sure you’re removing the correct things and improving the web experience for both end-users and search engines. Below are a few categories you should spend some time exploring. 

Technical: You don’t need to be an SEO expert to start your technical web audit (although you might want to enlist one to make the updates later on). Nowadays there are tons of tools, even free ones, to help you get a baseline for how your site is performing technically. We recommend starting the process with something like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console, or Hubspot’s Website Grader to get some of your current performance data. This will give you the information to prioritize workflows for making technical updates across the site. 

Content: Content is king and queen these days. And it’s super important to ensure that yours is authentic, helpful, and easy to index. You’ll want to look at your content through the following lenses: 

• Is your content in topic clusters?
• Is it scannable on a mobile device, tablet, laptop, and desktop?
• Is it engaging?
• Does it answer questions users actually care about? 

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll see patterns or gaps where you can apply guardrails for creating new content and updating current content. The result will be a new content strategy. 

Messaging: It’s one of the most underappreciated parts of a website, but people always notice when it’s wrong. Good messaging represents your brand authentically and makes your website feel like a one-to-one experience, even though it’s written for the masses. During your web audit, consider these questions: 

• Does your messaging sound authentic to your brand?
• Does it fit the medium? (Writing for the web is much different from writing for print.) 
• Is it easy to read? Literally (hello, accessibility) and figuratively (easy to follow, providing clarity)? 
• Is your messaging consistent? Tertiary detail pages, event pages, other supporting pages: this is where inconsistencies often creep in. But this is also where it can make a huge difference for the user. 

Navigation: Navigation is an interesting beast for large organizations. Factors like internal initiatives, politics, and preferences often arise when site navigation is discussed. That’s why we recommend user testing or additional market research with current or potential end-users. With good data, you can ensure that your navigation is what it’s meant to be: helpful and simple. 

2. Update in phases.

Once you’ve completed your website audit, the pieces will start to fall into place for prioritizing edits. We typically propose that you structure your updates in sections, defined by audience experiences. This might feel counterintuitive, but it makes sense because your user’s journeys aren’t strictly vertical or perfectly organized by topic. 

For instance, for higher education websites, we often prioritize the work according to audience segments: prospective students and influencers, current students, alumni and donors, and faculty and staff, to name a few. These are typically the audiences who visit the website the most often and most widely across pages. By having these pages up to date, you make the experience cohesive, which can improve the overall experience and impression these audiences have of your institution.

3. Plan for maintenance.

Remember how your site got into this mess in the first place? It was likely through years of one-off updates by multiple teams or contributors. Now is the time for you and your team to create a governance plan. This will outline who can make edits, how often edits are made, and what’s required for updates. 

So remember: If you’re feeling like your website needs a little TLC, these are the top ways you can take action and start to make progress — as early as today:

1. Start an audit. 
2. Choose an audience segment to focus on.
3. Make a plan for managing current and future edits.

These three practices will make a huge difference in creating changes across your site so that users and search engines can navigate your content better. They’ll also make it easier for you and your team to gain momentum toward a de-cluttered web experience, both internally and externally.