Are you finding it hard to locate things inside your cluttered WordPress installation? Is your site slow to load and backups taking forever? It’s time to do some serious cleaning up to spruce up your WordPress. Here are five things you can do to better organize your WordPress:
1. Site Structure
Start by tidying up your WordPress menu. A logical and simple menu guides visitors on your site to find what they’re searching for. Not only that, Google relies on the way your site is structured to find content, as well as to determine which content is more important than the rest. Categorize and tag your posts correctly, and make place for your major categories on the menu. A content heavy site may need a multilevel step down menu, but don’t overdo it.
2. Review Categories and Tags
Categorizing posts is necessary with WordPress and important for SEO. It helps search engines and visitors whittle down their search within the website. Categories make it easier for the user from the frontend and for site admins from the backend. Ideally, categories should be distinct with no overlap. With time, you’ll find that your categories and tags overlap, or are too numerous in number to help with navigation. Delete all the unused tags and go through all the remaining tags to see if you can bunch some of them together.
3. Create Internal Links In Your Blog Posts
Internal links are a great aid in improving SEO. They help to keep visitors longer on your site, directing them to other interesting content. WordPress makes it easy for writers to search for related posts to link to. Preferably, you should also make the time to revisit your older posts and link them to related new posts.
4. Check for Broken Links
Once in a while, check your website for broken links. No visitor likes to land on a dead end page and may not bother to follow directions to find relevant content. Whenever you change URLs or categories or tags, make sure to add a redirect to existing content.
5. Clean up the Database
Cleaning up your database can improve site performance a good deal. A new WordPress install has only a few database tables. But even as we keep adding content, the database swells and in time becomes unwieldy. It’s best to clean up the database before problems like slow loading, backing up or importing/exporting of files crop up. After backing up the database, start with emptying the Trash in posts and pages, delete unused themes and plugins, delete unapproved comments, spam and trash from Comments, and unused media files from the wp-uploads folder. Optimize the Database using the PHPMyAdmin Optimize Table option and delete all overheads, if any, from the table.
Implementing these steps diligently should help to rid your WordPress of much of the dead weight and present a more organized appearance. Maintaining a common sense approach while adding categories and tags and adopting a logical menu structure will go a long way to cleaning up and maintaining your WordPress.
