Sheep need to be shorn regularly. Letting all that fleece build up weighs them down, causes them to overheat, and could cause them illnesses. So when a sheep does appear that hasn’t been shorn in years, it’s definitely news.

Unfortunately, when a website that hasn’t been shorn in years appears, it isn’t news. It’s just another day.

But the same principles apply. Much like that angry sheep buried under kilos of wool, your website is buried under years of content. Blog posts. Contest rules. FAQs with questions no one asks any more.

And by shearing it, just like a sheep, your website will perform better.

Here are some tips for shearing your website:

Get the latest site map

If you’re using a content management system, you should have a site map already in place, but have you looked at it recently? Have you seen everything you have in place and seen how it all connects?

Revisit your site map, writing it out if necessary, and map out the links as well as how recently you’ve worked on it. You might find you have pages that aren’t linked anywhere. You might find a section you haven’t touched in years. Even if you keep your website regularly updated and organised, there is always something that slips through the cracks, and a freshly reviewed site map can show you that.

Check your statistics

Normally, people look at what’s doing well on their website – what’s popular, how people are reaching the checkout, that sort of thing. And if you have many pages, you’re much less likely to see what isn’t doing so well.

But you should be looking at them. Go to that last page of statistics and see what isn’t performing. Those are the pages you should focus on. Nobody’s visiting them anyway, after all, why not lose them?

See what can be combined

A popular SEO technique in the past was to create separate pages for each variation of a product, assuming that searchers (and Google) would be looking for that variation. So you would create a “blue extra-large shopping bag” page, and a “red extra-large shopping bag” page, and a “green large shopping bag” page, etc. Or a page for your Nottingham branch, and a page for your Leeds branch, and a page for your Birmingham branch…

That isn’t necessary any more. Rather than a bunch of pages with slightly different keywords and almost the same text, Google prefers one page with plenty of text. Make a single “shopping page” page. Or an “Our branches” page. Go through your pages and see what you can merge to make one awesome page filled with the information customers are looking for.

Out with the old

Do you still have up the rules for a contest you ran in 2011? What about a blog post introducing a product you no longer sell? While these pages might have been important at the time, now they’re just cluttering up your site and frustrating potential customers.

Review your past pages and see what could be removed. Most of these can be combined with other pages – for example, the terms and conditions for a contest you ran in the past can easily be added to the page with the contest winners. The blog post about an old product can redirect smoothly to the product that replaced it.

Don’t forget your redirects!

Once you’ve cleaned out the pages, don’t forget to set up your 301 redirects! These automatically redirect any links, whether on your own site or on another site, to the page you specify, giving you a smooth transition without having 404 errors popping up all over the place.

You can find out more about 301 redirects and how to set them up in “How do I redirect my site?” on the Support Database.

Cut out the extra fleece on your site and you’ll be running with the rest of the herd in no time!