5 tips to spring clean your website and benefit SEO (WordPress)

Is it time to spring clean your website? If your website is feeling a little tired and worn, and not getting the engagement it had previously, then it’s time to shake things up.

Follow our top tips to clean up your website to enhance performance, stay relevant and improve user experience to keep it shining in the SERPs for the rest of the year.

The following tips focus mainly on WordPress websites, and some can also be applied to other CMS platforms such as Wix, Webflow and Squarespace, where limitations may apply on other platforms.

If you have a random assortment of posts without a clear structure, start by deciding blog content pillars (main evergreen categories) and clustered content (article posts that support those pillars).

From there decide which pillar each post fits into and take one the following actions for uncategorised or blogs with low quality content:

• Set 410 GONE redirects to intentionally delete outdated or irrelevant blogs
• If the blog is still worth keeping, refresh out of date content

Properly manage Crawl budget – To ensure pages are indexed quickly. More pages and posts do not necessarily make SEO better; they still need to have clear intention, high quality content, good linking structure and fast load speed, to have a favourable impact on crawl budget. (1)

Ensure xml site maps are up to date – If your site structure has had significant changes since the last site map was submitted to the Search Console, it’s time to submit a new one.

When it comes to on-page optimisations, you can make a clean sweep through some areas of your content such as tweaking page meta titles, keywords and FAQs: 

Meta titles – Remove site name from meta titles save space for keywords. The site name is mentioned in SERPs above meta title already, as per example below:

Keyword strategy –

• Consider matching content to the intent of each page, e.g. keep purely informational or educational content out of commercial and transactional service pages. 
• Identify and remove duplicate content – ensure each page has its own unique primary target keyword to avoid diluting ranking signals across pages that are too similar in content. 
• Keep paragraphs short and avoid long blocks of text. 
• Include subheadings (H2s and H3s) that include keyword terms naturally.

Optimise FAQs for SEO Based on Search Intent

FAQs are not just there to “add content” they should support the intent of the primary keyword on the page. Including FAQs with mismatched search intent can weaken relevance, confuse search engines, and reduce conversion potential.

Go through each question and ask yourself – does this question match the intent of the primary keyword on the page? If it’s a service page with a transactional primary target keyword, include FAQs relating to the service rather than informational queries.

Additional tip: Type your target keyword into Google and see if a People also ask feature appears or use a free tool such as AnswerThePublic, those are likely the key questions to include on your page.

• Internal links – Ensure internal page links go to information and blogs that support the intent of the page. 
• Broken links – Using tools such as Ahrefs, Microsoft Clarity or Search Console to detect and fix broken links.
• External links – Check they are still live and relevant.

There are a myriad of ways and aspects to consider to optimise page speed, here’s our top 3 easy practical suggestions you can implement on your website straight away:

• Images – Reduce large images increase speed (generally keeping images under 200kb)
• Use modern image formats – webp avif instead of JPG and PNG
• Declutter plugins – update plugins and remove unused plugins

Since February 2026, Google new algorithm update specified that page crawl limit is reduced to 2MB (compared to 15MB previously). 

What does this mean and how does this affect SEO?
The first 2MB of an HTML file’s content is crawled and indexed and the rest of the content will not be indexed or count towards organic ranking signals.

Impact on AI and LLMs
AI powered searches may only see content within 2MB window making reduction essential for visibility in AI driven search. 

What is not affected by the 2MB crawl limit?
2MB limit refers to uncompressed raw HTML document, not the total page size including images. Most sites generally already fall within the limit. The concern is more for larger, complex sites and particularly e-commerce sites. 

What to do to make HTML files lean and crawlable?
Go through pages and check which have unusually large HTML sizes. You can use a free tool like Screaming Frog to view the HTML size for every page. Any page smaller than the limit is fully accessible to Googlebot.

Under 2 MB = safe for crawling and indexing
Over 300 KB = may need performance optimisation, but Google will still read it

However, pages over 300kb in general require optimisation, may need performance optimisation,  bigger pages can affect load speed, larger html pages slow down user experience but Google will still read it.

Here are 3 simple actions to take to improve crawlability and performance:

• Ensure most important links and calls to action (CTA) are near the top of the document. 
• Use lazy loading for content below the fold: a plugin such as WP Rocket or JetPack can handle this. 
• Make inline CSS and JS to be handled by external files (ie. move CSS styles to global style sheet).
  
  Aside:
  Inline CSS styles: These are the snippets of CSS in code blocks affect single element or group of elements and are not reusable across the whole site.
  
  Inline styles increase the HTML file size, which can affect the page load time.
  External styles are in a separate file (style.css), which reduces the HTML file size and can be cached for faster page loads. Consider if any of the inline CSS can be moved to an external sheet or in the global CSS section. (2)

Here, we’ve covered a few key areas and techniques on how to spring clean your website for SEO success. You’ve scrubbed your blog for outdated content and updated it, considered a crawl budget for speed and faster indexing, cleaned up metadata and employed keyword strategies for more unique, natural sounding content. 

In addition you’ve undertaken technical checks for resolving broken links and improved internal linking structure for better user experience. Reduced images and moved inline CSS styles to an external sheet to reduce page load. Lastly, ensuring all plugins are up to date and removing redundant ones. 

 If you still need help or a more deep professional website clean, we’re here to help with SEO strategy packages and custom website design informed by data that’s optimised to convert.

What Is Crawl Budget?
Crystallize

Difference between Inline, Internal and External CSS
GeeksforGeeks
Google reduces its crawl limit to 2 MB: What it means [+ Data from Seobility]
Seobility.net
Ecommerce SEO vs. Normal SEO: What’s the Difference?
AIOSEO
Do FAQ Sections Improve AEO Performance in LLMs?
Team4