The mighty website. The anchor to any brand's digital presence. The perfect tool to facilitate sales, grow relationships, and build brand awareness.

When people think about what goes into creating a high-quality, high-performing website, the misconception is that the hard part's over after launch. On the contrary, keeping a website relevant and functional requires consistent management, particularly when it comes to your content.

So if you're looking to optimise the performance of yours before the summer months, here are four tips to help you spring clean your website content.

#1: Make sure your content is relevant, accurate, and up to date

Low hanging fruit, but you'd be surprised at how quickly website content can age - and how many businesses are hosting inaccurate, irrelevant information on their pages.

Thoroughly review your content to make sure you're communicating the right information to your audience, and to keep Google happy when ranking your site. Common culprits are services pages, corporate policies, and company pages. AKA: business info that's susceptible to more regular change.

If you have facts and figures on your site, such proven ROI numbers or study findings, check these are still accurate, and consider including a footnote with the date they were verified too. Nothing tells your customer that a business has its ducks in a row like demonstrable and up to date outcomes.

#2: Check those links

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but broken links can be disastrous for the performance and ranking of your site, and reduce your user experience.

If you're new to this, it's nothing to sweat over. Broken links can occur for any number of reasons, such as content that's been removed or now on a different URL, a website migrating to a new domain or server, or even spelling errors in the URL link. Very common and very fixable.

Software like Semrush can conduct a backlink audit for you, and identify any that could be directing to a 404 or similar. If your broken link is internal, you can rectify it manually or set up a redirect to the right page. If it's external, reach out to the site administrator and ask for a correction.

#3: Test content across your devices - especially mobile

Your site might have perfect copy-to-imagery ratio, great whitespace, and appear crystal clear on a desktop, but if that's not reflected across other devices you'll quickly lose ranking and users.

Most website builders - WordPress, Webflow, HubSpot etc. - will have responsive design capabilities, and a reliable web developer will ensure your site looks and feels the way it should across all common devices on launch. But if you've updated anything since and not tested it, this is your big priority.

The main rule of thumb is to make sure your site content is as easily readable and navigable as it is on a desktop. Is your menu clear? Are images compressed to fit the screen size? Are links well-spaced and clear on pages and in blogs? Users judge harshly so time spent is well worth your while.

#4: Refresh and repackage content

Where would a website be without great content resources? Be it downloads, blogs, or videos, the material you publish on your site can add huge value and authority to your business.

As you're spring cleaning, it's worth looking at how you can refresh and repackage your content to make the most of it. Update time-sensitive content to give it new legs, or repurpose a high-performing blog or video for continued impact on a popular topic.

Quick tip: look at the behind-the-scenes work, too. Keyword relevancy, alt text, metadata and so on. There's nothing to say refreshes needs to be extensive, but small tweaks to existing content tells Google (and your audience) that you offer reliable and up to date resources. i.e. you're trustworthy.

Bonus Tip: Review the rest of your channels, too.

Nothing says an established, competent business like consistency, and that doesn't start and end with your website. Once you're happy with the quality and relevancy of your site content, spend a bit of time reviewing this against your other channels, too.

That's checking your 'About Us' is consistent across social bios. Making sure video content on Vimeo or YouTube directs traffic to the right website pages or resources. Communication materials like newsletters or marketing email sequences are optimised with the most up to date information. We could go on.

Regularly reviewing your website content - and how it's reflected elsewhere - may not seem like it needs to be a priority on your 'To Do' List, but it's time to bump it up to the top. Optimising what's on your site will help boost your SERP and SEO, build your digital authority, and provide your audience with the experience and information they need to trust your brand.

Well worth your time.

Enlist some support

Spring cleaning your website is a little like answering, “how long is a piece of string?” Simple tactics like repurposing a few pieces of content or updating your metadata can really pay off, and help build greater site performance over the entire year.

If you want to take your content one step further, it could be time to enlist outside support. An experienced content writer will be able to identify where your website is doing well and where it could do better, and advise on things like SEO, tone of voice and key messaging.

Or, if you want to overhaul your site’s performance, a content writer could conduct a full overview of your content with an audit. Opt for freelance and access the support when you need it, and only when you need it. The world wide web is your oyster.