Introduction
There are things to remove from your Website for peak performance.
A lot of website owners don’t pay attention to their website, but this is wrong.
“The goal of a website is to build trust with its visitors so they feel comfortable taking the next step.”
Few months ago, someone reached out to me and requested that I go through his company website to make sure everything was fine with the site.
The moment I clicked on the Website URL, the first thing I noticed was that it was very slow in loading.
So the first thing I did was to optimize the website to improve the speed, and in the process of doing that I realized that a lot of the images on the website were not Optimized.
I removed two things from the website; the first is Unoptimized Images, this can affect the website speed. The second thing I removed was grammatical errors and spelling mistakes.
This one has nothing to do with the website loading slowly, but I removed it because it has another negative effect on the website.
This second thing I removed may look insignificant, but it is not.
Keep reading to find out why.
Having a website for your business is a great way to build a strong presence for your brand and get positioned for greater visibility.
However, having a website is not enough, you wouldn’t want to invest in building a website and not get any ROI from your website.
Would you?
That’s why I came up with this blog post, to show you what you should remove from your website to ensure maximum performance and improved SEO rankings.
Okay, let’s get into it.
Five Things To Remove From Your Website Immediately:
First Thing To Remove From Your Website: Automatically Generated Content
I wanted to write “AI Generated Content”. But to be more accurate I chose the phrase “Automatically Generated Content”
Since the rise of AI, many content creators have resorted to using AI to generate content. While using AI to generate content is not against Google’s guidelines, there is an issue with it when it is not done appropriately.
Many marketers now depend entirely on AI to create content, they have a strong bond with AI. Such a bond that cannot be separated.
But this is a wrong approach to creating content. The use of AI is very important in digital marketing, it has its place. What is wrong is not knowing how to use it.
Before we go further, let’s answer the question;
Does Google Penalize AI Generated Content?
Well, according to Google, appropriate use of AI is not against their guidelines.
Google places emphasis on content being original, helpful and trustworthy, whether it is AI generated or human generated.
Using a special formula called E-E-A-T, Google evaluates content to determine whether it is of high quality and helpful.
E-E-A-T stands for Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.
As long as your content passes the E-E-A-T test, Google will regard it to be relevant to your users and rank it well for SEO, whether it is AI generated or human generated.
However, While Google is not against AI Generated Content, you should not depend wholly on AI to create content, that is why I placed emphasis on Automatically Generated Content, rather than AI Generated Content.
Content should not be produced automatically.
Because doing so will not yield a satisfactory user experience.
You should be involved in the content creation process. AI should not holistically create your website content, commit yourself to creating content.
Take some time and effort to produce fresh, personalized content for your website.
Why should you avoid using AI to automatically generate content?
First, there could be issues of duplicate content.
Two or more people using similar prompts to generate content with AI may end up having duplicate content.
You see, so your content wouldn’t be unique.
Furthermore, using AI to automatically generate content may not give you original content.
Even if you should use AI, let it serve as an aide, helping you to write and not doing the writing for you.
For content to be original, you need to be involved. For content to be original, AI should only be an assistant rather than the writer.
It should assist you in writing, not being the writer. This is a good way to utilize AI as long as creating original and unique content is concerned.
Second Thing To Remove From Your Website: Outdated Content
Revisit your previous articles and Improve them. Update your content to remain relevant.
Google has a preference for new content
Google aims to provide users with the most relevant and helpful response to their internet searches.
If your page fails to provide the reader with what they’re looking for, misleads them, or provides out-of-date information, you will have failed to deliver a satisfactory user experience.
What Is Outdated Content?
Any content on your website that is out of date, inaccurate or no longer relevant.
Imagine for instance, you run a real estate company and you developed an estate that was launched a few months ago. Before the estate was launched, you published content on your website talking about the estate, marketing it with a pre-launch price.
3 months later, the estate was launched and the price changed (increased).
Meanwhile, the content on your website is still showing people a pre-launch price.
Bad User Experience
Someone visits your website and sees the Pre-launch price, being so excited to find such a discounted price for a plot of land in the estate, he contacts your company and schedules an inspection.
Only to get to your office and discover that the price he found on your website was outdated.
He would feel disappointed and that would not be a good experience
That is not what Google wants to occur. Instead of displaying outdated content, Google tries to display a website that has accurate, relevant information on it. Leaving Outdated Content on your website can have a bad effect on your rankings.
Third Thing To Remove From Your Website:
Low Quality Content:
Did You Know?
Google gives low-quality pages a low page authority score.
Yes, Low quality content takes away from your website’s SEO. The goal of Google is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
You must improve your content if you want to compete for the top position on Search Engine Results Pages.
In order to create the finest content possible, you must comprehend what searchers are looking for.
Low Quality Content comes out when the writer is not willing to put in the effort and time required to create quality content.
What Is Low Quality Content?
How do you define Low Quality Content?
What makes a content low quality?
There are five Indices of Low Quality in a Content, let’s quickly look at them and understand what it really means to create high quality content.
5 Indices of Low Quality in Content Writing
- Grammatical and Spelling errors: Grammatical and spelling errors can affect your business credibility, especially if they are more frequent and obvious, because it can make you appear unprofessional and unserious to your visitors.
Furthermore, grammatical errors can affect your content trustworthiness. Your website visitors won’t have confidence in the information or content you provided.
- Incorrect information: Not well researched content, Wrong facts.
Commit time to creating content. Creating quality content takes time, it is not automatic. And it is not rush work. Commit time to research and get your facts correct
- Not Satisfying User Intent: If the content on your website doesn’t satisfy the search intents of your target audience, it has little or no value to them.
- Not Passing Google’s E-A-T: Google defines a high quality content as one that shows Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-A-T). In other words, your content has low quality if it doesn’t show you to be an expert and authority in your niche.
- Outdated Content: When content is outdated it has no value to your website visitors.
So what is high quality content?
It is simply content that has all of the above listed points checked.
Summary, high quality content is the most important component of your website.
That is why, in discussing the 5 things to remove from your website, I dedicated three points to Content.
Fourth Thing To Remove From Your Website:
Excessive Ads:
Oftentimes webmasters think that having so many Ads on their website will make them more money, but it is not often the case, especially in the long run.
Having ads on your website is not bad but there should be a limit to it.
There are certain websites that I have visited and angrily left within the first 30 seconds. Not because they didn’t have helpful content, probably they may have.
But I couldn’t stay long enough to even know whether the content was helpful or not, before exiting.
You know why?
Because of too many Ads.
Ads should not be annoying, they should be helpful.
Hurts User Experience
First, having too many ads on your website does not provide a good user experience.
Many of your website visitors would exit your website because of too many ads.
Increased Bounce Rate
Secondly, having too many ads on your website can increase the bounce rate of your website.
Imagine when a lot of your website visitors leave your website within the first 30 seconds, that would greatly affect your bounce rate. And in the long run it wouldn’t be profitable for your business.
Am I the only person that finds too many ads annoying? No of course
Have you heard of the word AdBlock?
It’s a software that helps your browser block ads from every website.
It’s becoming more predominant nowadays.
Why Ad Blockers?
The reason people block ads is because they find them annoying.
And guess what, there are a lot of people using AdBlock these days.
About 42.7% of internet users, worldwide currently use ad blocking software in some form.
According to research, When a sample of US-American adblock users were asked about their reasons for installing an adblocker, the single most popular reason given was “Too many ads are annoying or irrelevant.”
The second most common answer? “There are too many ads on the internet.”
At Smerise Digitals, we believe that Ads should be helpful not annoying.
Fifth Thing To Remove From Your Website:
Unoptimized Images:
Good quality Images help our websites look stunning and that’s great. However, these images can have a negative effect on your website if not well optimized.
Every image on your website takes up space and when the space is large it slows down the loading time of your website.
Optimizing an image means that you reduce the file size of the image without reducing the quality of the image.
At Smerise, it’s our culture to always optimize every image we use in creating content for our clients’ Websites.
Unoptimized Images can effect your website in Three ways ;
- Reduce the loading time. It takes longer to load.
- Increase bounce rate. We live in a busy world, people are impatient. When your website takes longer to load, most people would not have the patience to wait and that would lead to your website visitors leaving your website.
- Affects your website SEO.
How Do I Optimize Images For My Website?
There are many tools that can be used to optimize images, of these tools I will show you the ones I prefer.
There are two of them;
1. Online Compression Tools.
There are many online Compression tools, I will show you the ones I prefer
First one is TinyPNG.com
With the help of the user-friendly web application TinyPNG, you can compress up to 20 images at once. WebP, JPEG, and PNG file formats are supported, and it is free to use.
You can lower file sizes with TinyPNG and keep the same level of image quality. Optimized photos that load faster and require less server space are the outcome.
Second one is Kraken.io
This is a great online image optimizer. Similar to TinyPNG, it allows you to compress images in bulk and is free (with a premium option).
But compared to TinyPNG, it provides more options for compression.
2. Install WordPress Image Optimization Plugin.
Apart from online Compression tools, there are resources within WordPress that you can also use to optimize images, if you have a wordpress website.
A range of image optimization plugins are available for use with WordPress websites.
They are designed to help you make WordPress images smaller so that your website loads faster.
With Some of them you can even have your images automatically compressed when you add them to your website.
Some good examples include;
- Ewww Image Optimizer
- Smush
- WP Optimize
- Short pixel image optimizer
- Optimole
- Robin Image Optimizer
You can check them out in your WordPress dashboard.
Optimizing images can help your website performance and improve user experience.
In summary,
Removing these five things from your website will help your website improve its Search Engine rankings, give you a better user experience and improve the overall performance of your website.
Do you need help to optimize your website?
We can help! Please Send us a message now