13 Things To Remove From Your Website Immediately

Hi, I'm Andy from Orbit Media. Orbit has been focused on building and optimizing

website

s for 23 years. I've been a part of the planning process for over a thousand

website

projects and I've seen a lot of data and have some points. From the point of view, I'm going to share with you now a list of 13

things

that you should

remove

from

your

website and get rid of

immediately

and I'm going to make a quick argument for a bunch of

things

that I think you'll get. Better results if you just get rid of it, that's it, let's get started.

The first thing we need to

remove

is the vague homepage title, it's easy to fix and it's such a big problem because the visitor can't tell what you're doing if you're not there. descriptive look at this retuning the body, what does that mean? No one knows much better to simply make it descriptive, name the business category so the visitor knows they are in the right place. First question of each visitor to each web page. Am I in the right place? You can test

your

self in a 5 second test. I've uploaded a screenshot of a mock homepage that puts your people first.

What does that company do? It's not obvious if the 5-second test that seems A group of people are asked: what does this company do? They don't know how about something more specific: leadership training and training for mid-level managers. Aha, they can tell it passed the 5 second test because it's specific, it's descriptive and it's a rich key phrase, it's easy to search, that's good too, so if you have a website where the big text is pretty vague but the text below is actually quite specific and descriptive, just flip them over, easy and very common solution next to generic navigation labels, same thing. navigation tags at the top of the page if it only says similar products learn which companies support what I can't tell what this company does those tags don't allow me to accurately predict what I'll get if I click that's the point of the navigation tag Ty navigation visitors are segmented into pages that are more specific, how about this one for wholesale medical supplies?

Hey, if I click on that, now you know a lot about me, you can talk to me more specifically, that's the job, so if you have something that's really generic and vague and common to millions of websites, why not make it more specific, more descriptive, more keywords? Focus on helping your audience access the content that is most relevant to them, if you are curious about how your visitors use their navigation, simply go to G4, the explorations and click on path exploration at the top, you can click in Start again and then from the starting point choose the page path and screen class and select your home page, there is your navigation performance, this is how people interact with your menus, that is the click on your calls to action you can now optimize your main navigation by improving navigation labels adding specificity.

Great improvement. Next, there is also a problem of specificity. Subtitles as you scroll down the page. Do you see things like this? Our solutions. Who talks like that? hint, the only people who use the word Solutions are people who sell things, visitors never use the word Solutions. I've done thousands of hours of keyword research in my career and I never see the word Solutions come up because that's not how people talk. about stuff, that's how brands talk about it, so yeah that just adds visual noise, just the pixel height just pushes down everything below it, they would be better pages if they didn't have that at all or if they just you made specific.

Know and don't miss a keyword opportunity if you have an SEO goal here, then that will really help visitors and help search engines understand what you do. Meaningful sub headers are very important next to the homepage slideshow. I know there's a lot of debate about this, but the data is pretty clear, especially if there are tons and tons of slides. Watch this slideshow. 10 slides and by the way, on slide eight they mentioned that they are the smartest hospital in the world. Wait a minute, why didn't you put that in the beginning? people won't see any except the first slide.

There is a lot of research on this. Our friend Tom Bowen summed it all up in a post on our site. And you can check it yourself in analytics just to see the click rate. in the calls to action on later slides are usually very, very low, the following stock photos of people. They are simply not credible. I'm sure they are polished. Great lighting production value. Attractive models. That's not the way the world is and its visitors can smell it from a mile away. It's much better to just take an authentic photo. Look at my team.

I am very proud of them. Real people. It's authentic. The visitor can feel a connection. than production quality, get to work next, social media icons, especially when they are in the header and colorful, are candy-colored exit signs, why would you work so hard to encourage your visitors to to abandon traffic? It is easy and difficult to win. lose, why make giant colored buttons? The contrasting color will catch their attention and if they click on it, what will they get from hundreds of friends or headlines they want to catch up on or shoes they might want to buy or not read? notifications or cat videos are not good, they are not good for your engagement, the best way to include social media icons is to put them in the footer, if someone wants them they can find them right there when they hover over there There is the color, another good thing. remove dates from your blog posts, if your blog details page, article details page template has a date built in so it automatically displays the date and you have no option to include it or not, it's a problem unless you have news. content strategy most people don't have a news content strategy newsletters are mostly not news content marketing is mostly about useful and helpful articles evergreen content most content programs are evergreen, so What articles like this six tips for crafting a B2B thought leadership marketing strategy probably haven't done.

Not much has changed in the 10 years of waiting. I'm not reading this article. He is 10 years old. The date simply ages your content faster. If you want to include the date, you can put it in the title, in the body of the text, or in the next title tag in the list long paragraphs web designers know that visitors love Whit space, but the writers missed the note Never write a paragraph longer than three lines because blacky big paragraphs are skipped so it's not a good idea, much better to break up your content by simply hitting the return key more often and never missing the opportunity to use lists with bullets or numbered lists or bold or italics or subheadings or multiple images or internal links or any format that slows down your reader scanning and helps them know where to jump to your content, we know readers aren't reading every word, why not recognize it, accept it and make your content highly scannable and definitely avoid those long blocky paragraphs? press releases people will not agree with me.

I understand, please listen to me. The press release was not intended for the Internet. Just take a look at this one for immediate release. What does that mean to anyone? Quotes without bullet list no, well there is an internal link but strangely it goes to the same website they were already on and then there is an about section but that section is weaker than the about page which is very detailed and it has a story and a movement and a video, so everything about this is weaker than other versions elsewhere there is immediate contact, but who is this person?

There is no link to a bio, there is an email link and this just doesn't work well as much better web content. Instead of publishing a press release or maybe in addition to publishing your press release, also write the story that you hope the press release triggered when it was read by an editor or journalist, write the story and do it well, tell them that Don't wait for someone else to tell your story, tell it yourself and that PDF file. We just saw one. That PDF file is not a fan. Parallel Joke PDF. Call them the rust of the Internet because after our website. really hard to update people start to fix the hard to use CMS by just uploading PDFs, you know when they really just need a better way to manage content.

PDF files don't show up in analytics, they don't have JavaScript code if your PDF goes viral, you'll never know, they're not easy to share, no, they don't have built-in interactivity, they're not easy to update, it's literally a printed simulation, no They are accessible to people with disabilities, they are not easy to search there. There is no SEO that recommends a PDF as a search format. You know yes, you can control the exact format, but it is easy to download offline, but this does not align with digital content best practices. It's something that can be used as an alternative format to something that already exists in an HTML format which is best practice for the web.

How many PDF files do you have on your website? You can easily check just use this search operator or these two search operators. Site colon domain space colon PDF file type and that. It will tell you how many PDF files Google has found on your website, in other words, how much rust is on your website, so then the testimonials page. I love testimonials. Testimonials are powerful social proof along with tests and awards, and you know, trust seals and uh, data, statistics, years in business and reviews, these are powerful types of evidence, right, the best websites are full of evidence that they don't, they don't do a bunch of unsupported marketing CL, uh, claims that the worst websites are just tons of unsupported marketing claims, so yeah, testimonials are great, they're powerful, because they change the script, you take a powerful message and you change the messenger for that message, when you make the audience themselves the messenger, that message becomes much more believable, testimonials can become super authentic when they include a face, a name, a company, a job, a company, uh, the logo, a headline, a small right headline, the quote, quotes are the most powerful key on your keyboard, without a doubt, and the keyword.

Focus testimonial, right, a text-based testimonial. I can put a keyword in my point is to make each page a testimonial page. Don't hide all your testimonials on a page called testimonials because visitors won't click on it. Look at this analysis account. The testimonials page is the 33rd most popular page. Because? Do we put our best social proof on our 33rd most popular page? It's not that you meant to do it, but that you put them all together where they were weak because visitors tend not to click on the navigation label, next to the email links, listen to me carefully, here's my From the point of view of You, the desired action for a visitor on a website is to get in touch, but the best mechanism for that is the contact form.

A contact form has so many advantages over email. Breakdown, it's trackable in analytics, it's more reliable because The email doesn't always come through someone submits a contact form, it goes directly to your CRM database, it can take the person to a thank you page with additional information , it may send you an automatic response, which is not usually the case. You don't have to be on a computer with your correct email program, you can route the message and qualify the leads. May you know that you can target multiple people and are not a spam magnet? Every email link is a spam magnet because spammers have the right software that crawls. the website captures everything you know, deletes all email addresses and then starts receiving more spam so you know how to configure all your desired actions they must have a contact form calls to action go to the contact form contact the form contact goes to the thank you page The thank you page is set up as a conversion in Google Analytics 4 correct G4 last dead end The dead end of the website We are at the end of the experience They took an action They reached the thank you page What is that thank you page?

Take a look at this one, nothing, it just says thank you, here's ours, it says thank you, uh, but if that's all, you might as well say goodbye, sure, there's nothing here, it might disappear, find somewhere elsewebsite and complete another contact form. We're not offering them anything, so it's a missed opportunity to add content or add a conversion later. Look at this, we have a real call to action here, like you can subscribe to our newsletter from that thank you page. Wait a minute. Anyone really? sign up for a newsletter from their thank you page, yes, here are the analytics.

I track that as a separate conversion. Hundreds of people a year subscribe to our newsletter from that our email from that thank you page, so find and sort out all the details. your website keeps your visitors flowing and never miss an opportunity to give them more information, keep helping them and that is your first interaction with your new potential customer, so put on the white gloves, roll out the red carpet and give them a great experience at least . make it a compelling message by informing them of next steps, so there you have it, those are the 13 things we recommend removing from your website.

We know it was a mini complaint. It's fun to break it down this way. Yes, there may be exceptions. in the use cases I understand, but if you know someone who is struggling with their site's performance, feel free to share this again. Andy from Orbit Media, that was a lot, but we enjoyed making them and we'll come back and do them. I will have another one for goodbye