Imagine if blogging only involved writing and publishing posts. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?!
Unfortunately, blogging often entails extra work and maintenance.
Do you regularly clean your blog? Here are some great tips to get that much-needed blog clean-up done!
Here are some great tips to help with cleaning... your blog. #blogging Share on X
DAILY
Update all of your plugins and themes.
If you’re using WordPress, you most likely have some plugins. It’s essential to update your plugins as updates become available. Outdated plugins make your blog easier to hack (eeek—you can’t have that)!
I would also recommend documenting the updated plugin and the date you updated it. Jessica from Pig & Dac developed a great little tracking sheet for recording plugin updates. You can get her free tracking sheet HERE.
Delete spam and trash folders.
If I tackle this task daily, it will be less daunting. Deleting spam and trash folders only takes a few minutes.
WEEKLY
Delete unused plugins and themes.
Plugins and themes take up valuable disk space even if not activated.
Delete your drafts.
When I have too many drafts in my draft folder, curating posts becomes challenging because there are too many options to sift through.
Go through your draft folder and delete any posts that aren’t worth saving. I try to keep less than five publications in my draft folder.
If you use your draft folder to store your blog post ideas, consider tracking them on paper. I have a FREE printable blog ideas spreadsheet in this post HERE.
After you’ve deleted these drafts, empty your trash as well!
Test your website speed.
A fast website is a good website. Test your website speed at Pingdom. If your website is loading slowly, try compressing photos (especially the ones in your header and those near the top of your page).
Test your social media links.
Quickly go through each of your social media links and make sure they are working. If a link is broken, you may have lost the opportunity to gain a new follower!
Do the same with your share and subscribe buttons.
MONTHLY
Scan your site for broken links and make necessary repairs.
Broken links can harm your site rating.
Here are a few ways to find broken links:
* You can download the broken link checker plugin if using WordPress.
* There’s a free online broken link checker tool that you can use to scan your site.
* Web FX offers a fabulous tutorial on how to find and remove invalid URLs using Google Webmaster Tools.
Scan your site and repair or remove any broken links that show up.
Clean up your sidebar.
Evaluate your sidebar and eliminate any unnecessary images or ads. If there’s too much clutter, your ads or posts will be lost in the busyness and won’t get clicked.
If you have blog hop badges, consider placing them on one page.
Update old posts.
Since you’re cleaning, why not update two or three old posts? I encourage you to look up your most popular posts in Google Analytics, and if any of them need refreshing, then do so! Here’s a concise post about refreshing and reviving old blog posts.
Clean up your categories.
Spend some time evaluating your blog categories. Try to have less than 25 categories. The fewer, the better. Assess if there’s a way to combine a few categories into one. For example, maybe you have a kids category, kid’s activities, and kid’s stuff; perhaps all of these would fit into the category of “kids.”
YEARLY
Update your profile picture.
If your profile picture is old and outdated, update it! I change my picture every December, but if you’ve gone more than 2-3 years without updating yours, maybe consider a change!
Update your author/about me page.
Read your About Me page as if you’re seeing it for the first time. Is there any information that’s now irrelevant? Do you have new contact information? Do you now have three children instead of two?
Make any necessary revisions. Consider updating photos on this page as well.
Update your disclosure page.
Read your disclosure page and ensure that all the programs you work with are current and relevant.
Don’t forget to document your clean-up efforts!
It’s essential to keep track of your efforts. I’ve created a FREE, one-page printable checklist of these tasks for your convenience. Just click the download button below to claim your free checklist!
Psst – get your blog clean-up checklist here!
Here is a helpful printable that divides your blog clean-up into daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly tasks.
SHARE WITH OTHERS
Oh I love this Jennifer! I am excited to print this- thanks so much for sharing! I was recently thinking I needed to check for broken links but was not sure how- thank you so much!
I’m so glad you enjoyed this Keri. I hope it helps you stay organized and on track with cleaning your blog!
Lots of good tips here! I like to use the WP Optimize plugin that takes care of some of these steps all in one click (cleans out your spam folder, trash folder, and any drafts you don’t want).
I’m glad you found these tips helpful Bev! The WP Optimize plugin sounds great. I’ll have to check that one out.
These are awesome tips and truly try my best daily, but I still appreciate any and all help on this, especially the broken links plugin, which I so need to try. Thanks, Jennifer ;) xoxo!!
I’m so glad you enjoyed this post Janine. I hope it helps you with cleaning your own blog.
This is looking super helpful! Thank you!
Pinning so I can dig into it even further at a later date. :)
I hope this helps you with your blog clean up tasks.
Thanks so much for pinning too!
Excellent! Very helpful, especially to us newbies. I’ve tweeted it, pinned it; doing this today!
I’m glad you enjoyed these tips and I truly appreciate the social shares… thanks!
These are great tips! I need to check if I have broken links, and I did some sprucing up of my About Me page recently. A little maintenance goes a long way in keeping your page professional! Dropping by from SITS!
I’m so glad you found this information helpful.
A clean blog, is definitely a more professional-looking blog.
Thanks for stopping by!
Great things to remember that I wouldn’t think about. We just had photos taken today and will be updating my About Me photo, which is good since I no longer even have that hair style that’s in my photo.
I’m glad this gave you some ideas and things to look into when cleaning your blog.
Thanks so much for stopping by!
So much goodness Jennifer. I have been so terrible about cleaning up my blog. I barely have time to write. I need to devote a week to behind the scenes stuff and not post as much. That’s the only way I’m going to catch up.
Thank you for the motivation!
xoxo
Well hopefully the checklist will make your blog clean-up a lot less daunting of a task. Seriously, when you break it up into daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly projects, it’s more manageable.
Fab post, so helpful. I really need to do this. I have pinned so I can check back at the things I need to do.
Thanks for advice and sharing. Over from Saturday Sharefest :)
I’m so glad you found this helpful! Thank for for pinning (and for stopping by from the Saturday Sharefest).
Great tips. Do you know just this week I tried to get on three different blogs and it would not take me to their page. What is frustrating with that is that you think it is your computer or at your end something is wrong. Anyways, hope your having a wonderful Mother’s Day.
Yes, it’s so frustrating when you click a link and it doesn’t take you where you think it should take you!
I hope you had a wonderful Mother’s Day as well.
Hi Jennifer! I checked my loading speed with the link you provided. It was a bit slow, I was surprised. I’ll have to make sure my trash is emptied, and see if I have any broken links.
Thank you so much for these tips!! I always learn from you, thank you for sharing again.
It’s Mother’s Day in the USA, so ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ to my favorite Canadian blogger :)
Ceil
I’m glad you enjoyed these tips Ceil!
I had a wonderful Mother’s Day. I was pampered and I spent some time pampering my mom.
There are a few tips here that I can use personally but since most of these are related to WordPress a lot of their users will be grateful for the checklist. I’m thinking of going over to WP but still haven’t taken the plunge but will one day.
I’m glad that there were still a few tips you could use. There’s obviously a bit more maintenance required with WordPress than there is with Blogger.
This is so great – I actually just did a lot of that over the weekend. I had to update plug-ins and delete ones I didn’t use. And I changed my Disclosure page (from inspiration by Echo) and I updated my sidebar too. It felt so good! Ah, spring cleaning.
Good for you! I love the spring cleaning (home or blog) too! It feels so good.
I love this post. And, I’m so happy that I’ve graduated to a point (1-yr in) that I need a post like this. I’m going to share and then spend some time over the next few weeks doing all of this. Thank you.
Congratulations at surpassing that one year mark!
I’m so glad you found this helpful Caryn – I hope it makes the task of cleaning your blog a bit easier.
I need to give my blog an OVERHAUL – ASAP! Actually I really want to find someone AMAZING to hire so they can do it for me! LOL! I don’t want to stress over the thought of losing my content, “breaking” my site and what not – I have been there all to often!
I’ve broken my site a couple times too! I try to stay away from the HTML – that kills me every time.
Thanks for this excellent list, Jennifer! I so appreciate you sharing your wisdom.
Pinning this one!
I’m glad you enjoyed this Heather. I hope the list comes in handy.
Thanks so much for pinning!
xoxo
Ahhhh you are SO awesome! I tweeted and pinned this. You know how I always say I want to be a fly on your wall so I can see how you do everything…love posts like this!! Also…my profile pic is 2 years old. I’ve been wanting and needing to change it so bad. Thank you for the reminder!
Best comment ever! The enthusiasm has me pumped lol!
I’m so glad you enjoyed this Jessica and I hope it helps you with the cleaning and maintenance of your blog… and of course I had to give you a shout-out because the plug-in spreadsheet is an essential!
Thank you for pinning and tweeting.
Sorry it took me a while to get over here since #sitsblogging! School ends next week and I swear one more project or activity and so help me I’m going to…… (fill in the blank here if you would like).
Great post Jennifer! This is one of the boring and thankless jobs of blogging, but doing it makes such a HUGE difference! I love your snazzy printables and downloads.
I feel kind of bad though I have hardly any drafts? What am I doing wrong there?
Yes, the maintenance is the most thankless and tedious tasks but it does make a difference to how professional the site ends up looking. Broken links and bad flow tend to drive readers away.
So glad you enjoyed this and I’m delighted you enjoyed the download. I hope it helps you keep your blog clean.
Thanks a lot Jennifer, I do the regular updating of older posts, reduced my categories as well, I now have one side bar instead of two, re wrote my about page and start here pages as well.
I am yet to tackle broken links! For Plugins, I take out what is not useful.
Thanks for the blogging tips as usual. You know I look forward to reading them here.
God Bless.
I’m so glad you found this post helpful Ifeoma. It sounds like you’re on top of your blog maintenance. That’s great!
Great list, Jennifer. I’m just inching into my second year as a blogger (whoo hoo I stuck to it for a whole year!) but now that I’ve accumulated enough content, it’s time I start doing some of the activities you’ve listed above.
I’m glad you found this helpful.
Congratulations on one full year of blogging. That’s awesome… lots of people drop it after 6 months.
Thanks for sharing.
This is a wonderful resource, Jennifer. I’m struggling with site speed right now. I’ll have to check out that link you shared. Thanks for all of this fantastic and much needed information. Pinning!
I’m so glad you enjoyed this Candace! Thank you for pinning.
Great tips! I’ll have to check this out more when I have the time.
liz @ sundays with sophie
Glad you enjoyed this Liz!
I like the idea of having a linky page instead of cluttering individual pages, but I don’t think anybody would look at it. Don’t think the hosts would care much for me doing that
My blog hop page is one of my most popular blog pages! I’ve seen some people include a line at the end of every post that says, “This post may be linked up to any of these parties” (with a hyper-link to their blog page).
I know for my SHINE Blog Hop, I don’t require a link on the post itself or the sidebar. People can post it wherever they like on their blog (or not). However, there are some linky parties that are very strict when it comes to stuff like that… I just don’t participate in those parties though.
Thanks for this post Jennifer! I do a lot of the things… but there were a few you suggested that I have not done yet like deleting old urls. Oh and I wanted to check the speed of my site. Pinning to reference!
I’m so glad you enjoyed these tips on how to clean up your blog! Thanks for pinning!
This is excellent advice! I have recently cleaned up my sidebar. I placed all of my blog hop links in one place since it was starting to get crowded. I have even gone back and deleted some old posts and updated some others. One thing I can’t seem to part with are my 100+ drafts! LOL! #SHINEbloghop
The sidebar can get crowded really quickly if it has blog hop links in it. That’s great that you put them on one page!
100+ drafts!? Oh my! You might have to part with some of those. lol
I’m glad you enjoyed these tips on how to clean up your blog.
This is so helpful! Thank you so much.
You’re welcome Cynthia! I’m glad you enjoyed these tips on how to clean your blog.
Great List, Jennifer! Thanks for the reminder. It’s so easy to forget about online clutter! In the realm of cleaning up plugins I’d also recommend using the P3 Plugin Profiler. It’ll let anyone know which plugins are taking up the most load time. Oh, and maybe run a quick speed test too in order to make sure that the site isn’t lagging.
Oooh, I’ll have to check out the P3 Plugin Profiler. That sounds like a pretty handy plugin!
I’m glad you enjoyed these tips on how to clean up your blog!
this is absolutely BRILLIANT. i’m going to start implementing some of these – like the deleting of drafts!??? PERFECT!!! that forces me to either WRITE THE POSTS or let them go. love it. <3
I’m glad you enjoyed this Stephanie!
Deleting drafts is a really good practice. Plus all of those drafts take up precious space on your blog. If you have too many, it becomes challenging to hone in on one idea and write.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on how to clean your blog!
Oh my goodness! Being new I did not know about half of these things! Yikes! I’ve bookmarked your post and will be using it as checklist. Thank you so much!!
I’m delighted that this post gave you some tips on how to clean your blog! Thank you for bookmarking and please make sure to download the free checklist.
So helpful, Jennifer. I’ve been looking for a list like this and I’m glad you shared it. It’s tough blogging–it’s more than just writing or a great graphic, as you say. So, it’s nice to be able to look through all its intricacies and do a bit of house-keeping, albeit weekly, daily, monthly, or even yearly. Thank you for sharing this! I really needed it.
I’m so glad you enjoyed this Maria and that you found the checklist helpful. There IS a lot of work to blogging. It helps to be organized.
Such a great list, and so many I still need to do! Many of these are thankfully taken care of (like the broken link plug in you mentioned is a lifesaver). Others I need to be better about, like updating my photo. Pinning this to my board!
I’m glad you found this post helpful Nina. Cleaning your blog takes time but it’s important and is manageable when broken down into smaller tasks.
Thanks for pinning!
xoxo
This is a great comprehensive list! Love it! And you’ve inspired me to do some “spring cleaning” this weekend! Lord knows I need to do a lot of these things… especially drafts!
I’m glad you found this list helpful Meg. I hope you were able to get some of your blog “spring cleaning” done!
So many things I’ve never thought of! Your right, there is SO much more to blogging than blogging!! Have downloaded your form so I can get my blog cleaned up!! More to add to the to do list!!
I’m so glad you enjoyed this! I hope the downloadable checklist helps you through the process of cleaning and maintaining your blog.
On form with another great post Jennifer!
I don’t often empty my trash folder on my blog, but will do now, it never occurred me that it may slow things down!
I probably spend as much time fiddle farting around on my blog as I do writing, sometimes it’s fun, but other times it can be a drag, but it’s an important drag.
I recently took some of your previous advice and scheduled some post ideas, on the Editorial Calender, for the coming weeks as we are going into summer, which gets a little crazy.
I’m glad you found this helpful and informative Deb!
There’s a lot of work to blogging… that’s for sure. I find having a maintenance schedule to be very useful.
This is awesome! I love how you laid everything out and I love the printable!
Thanks Echo! I’m glad you found this helpful. Enjoy the printable.
Thank you so much for publishing this post! It is so helpful – I had no idea how many broken links were on my blog! I featured this article ( with a link to your blog!) on my blog today. I know my readers will love it, and your blog!
Thanks for the post – these are great tips. I’m afraid I would forget most of this regular “cleaning” so I’ve pinned this for later. I’ll also be following your blog. Thanks!
Dang so much good info! Just need to find time to do it all :/
I have ADD and I tend to become overwhelmed with all the things I need to do. I love having a list of things to do as oppose to just doing stuff of the top of my head. Thanks for sharing this!
I’m a list person too. It keeps me focused and organized.
I’m delighted you found this to be of help!
Wishing you a lovely weekend.
These are great tips! Pinning for future use. Thanks for sharing!
I’m glad you enjoyed these tips, Lauren. I hope they help you as you work to clean your blog.
Thanks for pinning!
This is a fantastic list! I’m so not doing some of these things like I should be. Thank you for this!
I’m delighted you enjoyed this and found the list helpful. Thanks for stopping by.
Wishing you a lovely weekend.
Many thanks for this. My site Willow and Thatch (which is dedicated to costume and period dramas) is just four months old and I was already able to put several of your suggestions to good use, and will continue to do so.
I’m glad you found this useful! Yes, it’s never too early to do blog clean-up and maintenance.
Indeed! Thanks for stopping by Willow and Thatch :) I’m looking forward to participating in your SHINE blog hop, if I can figure out how to do it!
Thank you Jeniffer for this amazing post. We surely learn some awesome stuff to do every single day to maintain our blog at its tip top shape :) God bless you!
All the Best,
Jan Limark
I’m delighted you found this helpful Jan! Thank you for sharing your thoughts on blog cleaning / maintenance.