Websites, web servers and spare rooms have one thing in common, they collect junk.
Recently we have been doing quite a bit of work moving websites and/or taking over maintaining sites. What we are finding more times than not is that the website and the webserver itself are often full of junk.
[One (nameless) website that springs to mind had pages and pages of products that no longer are valid, some in fact no longer exist. They were just there taking up space and making what the company does blurrier. Do you have pages like that on your website?
Another example is finding old_index.html files and other old_someother page.html files littering the webserver folders. A classic example is finding BACKUP folders on the webserver from a prior upgrade/change to the site. Not to forget the backup2, backup3 and onwards folders. Do you have space wasting away on your webserver?
Last and by no means least, is junk in your databases. Have you changed the structure of your website and altered the database tables to reflect it? Did you do the old, rename the table trick? So the pages table became xPages, so you could quickly switch back if you had to? Is the old table still there?
So here is our suggestion, take a look at your web pages and check for ones that are redundant, then delete them. If they are redundant, talking about services or products you don’t deal with anymore then get rid of them. The temptation is to leave them there, you never know someone might call you about that oneday… but don’t it looks bad if they do call and you get caught out having an out of date website. It also creates useless traffic, pages of stuff that does not have potential revenue attached. It also watses your visitors time, and the more time they spend on dead pages the less time they have for your real pages. So bin them!
Second, maybe today is the day you take a look at the files and folders on your webserver and look for junk that has accumulated. Clear it out. If you are not sure what is valid, why not make a local copy and delete everything that looks like junk and see if everything else works still? Better yet, start from an empty folder and copy only the stuff that works across, copy files as you notice problems. Now may also be a good time to document the structure and quirks of the website so the next person to come along knows whats what.
Third, take a close look at your database(s) and see if you can clean them up too.
Of course, if all that sounds like hard work, give us a call and we can do it for you.
Photo by Chris Smart on Flickr
