Pages and Posts
Over time, your site can get cluttered with outdated and disorganized pages and posts. Consider the following ideas to help clean up your site’s content and structure
- Review drafts
Review all your draft pages and posts and determine if they’re still relevant. Anything you don’t need can be moved to trash, which is emptied every 30 days. - Ensure pages are relevant
All pages and posts that are published are visible in search engines and public, meaning that can still be accessed online even if they are not linked anywhere in your navigation. If you have any old or stale pages that you don’t want people accessing, consider switching their status to draft or moving them to trash. On the other hand, if you want people to access these pages more readily, you can add them to your navigation or link them on a relevant page on your site. - Ensure posts are relevant
Posts tend to include information that is only relevant for a short period of time, such as about upcoming events or current news stories. If you find that you have posts that are old and no longer needed, consider moving them to trash.
Site Editors
Take a look through your user list by visiting Users > All Users from the admin panel of your site. Make sure nobody has access to your site who should not, such as previous students who have since graduated or old staff members.
Media Library
Visit your media library by visiting Media from the admin panel of your site. If there are photos you know are not on a page, you can delete them. Unfortunately, the Media interface in WordPress will not be able to accurately indicate whether an image is actually used on a page, so make sure that image isn’t being used on your pages before you delete it.
You should also take a look at the list view (by clicking the icon in the top left) to see which images are missing alt text. If an image is missing alt text within the media library, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is missing alt text on the page, as these are controlled independently. However, setting alt text from the media library (and in the uploader whenever you add a new image) is a great habit since the alt text will then be automatically used when the image is added to any page.
Not sure how or when to use alt text? Here’s some guidelines to follow.
Broken Links
It’s important that you check your website for links that may be broken. It’s common for links to change over time, especially if they link to external websites. You can use the Broken Link Checker plugin which will generate a list of links that are broken on the WordPress dashboard. If you have any links that are broken, go in and update them to the correct link or remove the link if it is no longer needed.
Contact Info
If your site lists contact information or staff contacts, make sure they are all up-to-date. This is often the highest-traffic page on your site after the homepage, and outdated info can make your site look abandoned.