On today’s episode, we are going to talk about the 17 things to remove from your website in 2017, right here on Your Website Engineer, Podcast Episode No. 319.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today, we are going to be talking about the things that may be outdated on our websites. And a lot of these things I need to look at myself on my own website and so we’re going to dive into that in just a couple minutes.

The first thing that I want to share with you is a public service announcement, as it is the brand-new start of a new year. You want to make sure that the footer text of your website now has a new copyright date that should obviously be saying 2017 and you want to make sure that your website theme does not have that hardcoded in and make sure that that is updated properly if it is a dynamic piece of information on your website.

I was looking at a customer’s website that had purchased their – as using the storefront theme from WooCommerce – and today, that it – everything looked right. The code said it was pulling in the server information for the year and then I pulled in a little bit more information. It said the date on the server was September 23, 2016. And, of course, the year was showing 2016, so I had to urge him to reach out to his hosting company and make sure that they got that updated on their website.

You know, you can go in there and you can hardcode things and you can put 2017 but then every year, you have to go back in and remember where that was and you have to update – that’s 2018, 2019.

But you – there’s a little bit of code and I’ve got this in the show notes for Episode No. 319. But you basically can just put into – in PHP brackets you can say: Echo, get (underscore) the (underscore) date; and then, in parenthesis, parenthesis – and then inside the parentheses, you just want single quotes around it and then a capital Y. I know that’s really hard to understand in a audio podcast but, again, there’s a link in the show notes for it.

And you basically can just drop this into your theme and it’ll automatically pull in the year of that information. If you want to put – If you want to pull in more information, like I did on this – when I was testing – you can add the month and the day and you can add those variables as well.

So, that’s something that you want to think about. That’s something that you want to make sure that is updated on your site, here in 2017.

Another thing that I want to share with you today is the plugin of the week. There are so many plugins in the WordPress repository, it’s hard to track of all of them – you know, with thousands of them out there – and this is a plugin that I found today called Direct Stripe.

And it is kind of like the PayPal button that you can generate on PayPal but this is a Stripe button and it’s a high conversion checkout without people leaving your site. It’s all built right in. You can do payments, donations, subscriptions; you can style it and have terms and conditions and all that good stuff, with automated email options as well.

So you can do that; you can make the button appear any way that you like. You know, you “Donate Now” – “Give Here”. You say any of those things and you can go ahead and generate that with this free plugin on the WordPress repository.

If you’re interested, give it a check over there on the WordPress repository or you can find more in the show notes under 319. And you can just search for “Direct Stripe” if you’re going straight to the WordPress repository.

There are more than 48,000 plugins now in the WordPress repository and it’s really getting hard to find exactly what you’re looking for. But I think this is a good choice for a lot of people who maybe want to add that payment button or they want to add that ability to accept payments on their website.

Alright, today we’re going to dive in and we’re going to talk about the 17 top things that we need to be removing from our websites. And the first one, I’m guilty of and I will be working on getting rid of this in the coming month.

But the social media icons in your header, especially if they’re color-coded as the same color as the icons – you know, blue for Facebook and Twitter, and you’ve the red ones for YouTube and Pinterest, and all those different things.

So, you want to make sure that there’s – this is always good information to have. You want to have your social profiles but you want to make them a little less obvious. You know, you don’t want people to come into your home site – or home page – and then, all of a sudden, they see the Facebook icon. Like, “Oh! I remember I was going to” – you know, “I was going to send this message to (so-and-so) and let’s go ahead and do that right now.” They click on it; they go away from your site. They forget exactly what they were doing and you can just lose traffic just like that.

So, if you need to have them in the header, I highly recommend, like, making them the same color as the rest of your menu; making them kind of blend in a little bit so they’re not visually prominent. You can also add these to the footer of your website versus the header, so they’re there. And also, only link to social networks that you’re only generally active. So, you don’t want to be saying, like, “Go to my Instagram account” if you haven’t posted anything on Instagram in three-and-a-half years. So that’s something to think about, as well, when you’re doing that.

Let’s see. The next one is you want to stop playing suggested videos on your YouTube channel after they’ve been embedded on your website. And it’s really easy to get YouTube videos to play on your website these days. You know, basically, you just – you paste in the URL to the video and it just starts working. But if you do that, then it’s going to automatically, at the end of it, show these, like, cat videos or, you know, random things that other people – like, when people are signed in to their YouTube channel, those suggested videos are curated specifically to trigger their interest.

And so, if somebody comes to your website, they look at your video on how to, you know, build a better website or how to, you know, do underwater basket weaving or whatever that thing is that your website is promoting. Then it sees – “Oh! This is” you know, “bloopers from this TV show that I really like.” Like, “I’m going to click on that and completely go away from what I was doing on your website.”

So, instead of just clicking on the – or pasting the URL inside of WordPress – if you go to the “Share” feature and then embed, and then under the “Share More” feature – or the “Show More” feature – you can uncheck the box that says, “Show suggested videos when video finishes.” So, that’s what you want to do and then that will give you – that will prompt – turn that prompt off and there won’t be anything to display, once somebody finishes your video.

Another thing that you want to remove from your website in 2017 is long paragraphs. Visitors come to your website and they scan; they want to see short paragraphs. And that’s the best way to make things – make your content scannable. It’s going to take up a little bit more space visually, like top to bottom, but it’s going to be so much easier for the eye to see. And then especially, highlight and underline or use block quotes or something, to really pull out that information that’s really, really vital for your customer or your visitor to read.

So never make a paragraph more than three or four lines. You want to make things more easy to be scanned, so that’s things like bullets or lists or bolding or internal links; things like that. Make them, you know, something that’s very, very easy for somebody else to notice when they are, you know, coming to your website and browsing.

Another thing that we want to do is remove stock photos of people. This is “stranger danger”, if you will. People – Pictures are powerful because their faces are compelling. Like, that’s the main reason why we like to look at pictures of people. But when you come into – when you see that perfect set of people sitting around a table. You know, they’re all looking at one person; they’re gazing and somebody’s writing notes. You know, you know that that is a staged photo and it’s just fake. It’s not – that perfect lighting, the spotless office – like, that’s not really there.

I would highly recommend using some sort of – maybe you use a selfie or you use something that’s a lot more realistic and just make that look like you have – what’s the word I’m looking for? Just make sure that you have some appeal and show that this is the real you or this is your real office or whatever. That’s another thing to do in 2017.

This one is kind of unique and interesting and I found this on an article when I was kind of looking for some of the – you know, curating a bunch of different topics for – to get rid of. And this one was: Get rid of PDF files. They call them “the rust of the internet”. And here are some pros and cons of using PDFs versus HTML pages.

If you use a PDF, you can’t measure the traffic. If you use a PDF, they’re – it’s harder to share without – Well, you can’t use sharing buttons inside of a PDF – not very easily. It’s hard to keep a PDF updated, so that’s kind of a bad thing. It’s easy to make accessible for visitors with disabilities. It’s – That’s a mostly, know, like, it’s really hard to make a PDF version of something – you know, make it accessible. It’s – It doesn’t have a lot of interactivity; it doesn’t scale really well – like, browser size and whatnot. It’s not search engine-friendly and things like that.

So, the recommendation is to take the – all the information that you have saved in PDFs, turn them into a web page so then Google can crawl all that information really well. You can – People can view it on their website but then you can always link to a PDF document. So that, in case people are trying to print or they’re trying to download it to read offline, things like that, that they can still do that. So, remove PDF documents is the next recommendation.

Another thing that we want to remove is ads for our own things. And I say this because we kind of get – we get blind to ads. You know, you sometimes just kind of force yourself to just block them out. You don’t even see them. You don’t even realize they’re ads. But what we’re doing on our websites is we’re actually advertising for our own things. You know, we’re putting product images places – you know, on the sidebar and different things – and our brain is just shut off. Anything that looks like an ad, it don’t even read it.

And so, we want to make sure that we’re not promoting our own stuff in ad-like looking things. I would recommend putting your content within – or putting your promotional content inside your content. Maybe you are adding that as part of a post or a page and you can add a simple text-based call-to-actions at the bottom of every page. They don’t stand out as much but people are more apt to read them.

And so, if you want to weigh the decision if you’re going to put an ad-type thing on and nobody’s going to see it or nobody’s going to read it, that’s not nearly as good as if, you know, somebody reads a text. You know, it takes them a little while to find it but if they actually read it, and then they can follow through and they can do something with it. So that’s another recommendation is to remove ads from your own products.

Another recommendation is to remove your testimonial page, unless you’re getting a lot of traffic and I don’t think this is happening. You can open up your Google Analytics and see how many people are actually coming to your testimonial page and how much time they’re spending on this page. But highly unlikely – like, there’s not a lot of people that just go to a testimonial page and just read testimonials.

You know, maybe some services and some businesses and things like that, they do thrive on testimonials, but I think building into those testimonials on individual pages. You know, just kind of a block at the bottom of your page or in the footer, I’ve seen them; or even in the sidebar that they rotate or they change on every single page load or whatnot. I think those are really good options, so they’re always there, first and foremost, for people to see and people to appreciate and actually read versus going to a specific page and reading all of them. So that’s another recommendation.

This one, I haven’t had a lot of problems with but I know a lot of people that have problems with when they list their email address on their website. It is – They say that they get a lot of spam. It’s bad for their marketing and it’s good for spam. And so – Plus, if you have an email address on your website and then you have it linked and then somebody clicks on it, opens up their default web browser or their default mail client, and if you’re not using the default mail client, it’s just kind of a bad overall experience.

And so, the recommendation is to use a contact form of some sort. Put that on your website so people can go – they don’t have to, you know, fill out, you know, a regular email. They just put in their – whatever information that you’re asking for. You can restrict or you can make different fields required. And so that you get all the pertinent information that you need to follow up with your request, whatever that may be. You know, maybe you’re a company and you want to call people back – you want to require them to add a phone number so you can actually call people back.

So, you want to just remove all email links from your website; you add a simple contact form with a “thank you” page. You can then – You can use your Google Analytics to figure out what the – You can set a goal for your Google Analytics, I guess, to make sure that when you have things set up – like, when people get to the “thank you” page – that they’ve submitted a message through your contact form. You can set up email auto-responses off of that, if you want to.

And then, you also can – Usually, most WordPress plugins that do forms, like GravityForms and Ninja Forms – like, they save all those entries right to your WordPress site. So sometimes those emails don’t actually get to you but if they don’t, then you have that extra copy, that backup, right there on your website that you can look at and you can figure out, “Okay. I missed this one. Maybe I need to follow up with” and whatnot.

Another one, along those same lines, is you want to make sure you get rid of – and this is quote/unquote “greedy forms”. And this is a form that wants you to ask, like – they want to ask you 22 questions before you can actually go in and sign up for the email newsletter. Like, you probably don’t need, you know, first name, last name, company, address, city, state, zip code, country; do you like – what’s your favorite, you know – what’s your favorite content management system, what color is your website. You know, like, all these random questions. You don’t need all this information to sign up for a newsletter.

If you want this information, I highly recommend, like, just asking for the first name, last name, email address. And then you can always follow that up with a form. Like, “Hey. Tell me more about yourself” and then that could be an additional form that they can fill out. Or, once they’re already on your list, and you don’t want to blast them with this right away because people may automatically unsubscribe if they’re getting this information right away.

So, that’s another thing to get rid of. Get rid of those greedy forms. Make them short, simple and to the point so people will actually sign up and then you can ask for that information later.

This one’s interesting and it’s called the – we want to make sure that we’re not using “Submit” as a call to action. I see this a lot on websites. It’s, like, “Download my free report” and then the button says “Submit”. And it’s like – Ah, that’s not really the best call to action. Or even on a form, like, that’s not the best to say “Submit”. You want to say, “Send my message now” or whatever. Like, the “Get free report” is much better than “Submit” on those. “Get your membership” is okay but you could say, “Get” – “Find your gym and get your membership”.

Like, that’s going to be a little bit better and those buttons are going to be a little bigger; they’re going to be a little bit more prominent. You know, maybe instead of “Create your account”, you say, “Create account and get started”. Like, just making those a little bit more custom is going to make it that much better of a conversion when somebody sees that button and they’re actually going to click on it. So that is another lesson or another thing to work on in 2017.

2017 also should be removing Flash. It’s – That’s pretty simple to think about. We don’t want to have Flash on our website. It is 2017. Let’s just go ahead and remove that. That is something else that can be removed, should be removed and shouldn’t ever be back on websites ever again.

The next one is – let’s see. It should be auto-starting video. That’s something – Oh. We want to make sure that our websites don’t automatically start video or start audio or anything, as people are browsing to them. People may be in a cubicle or an office, you know, without headphones plugged in and then, all of a sudden, it’s blaring across their office. The first thing they’re going to do is just hit the “X” and close out of the window because that’s the fastest thing that they can do to make that noise stop. You want to make sure that we aren’t auto-starting videos.

Another thing that we can remove from our website is anything that is like a low-quality post, a low-quality guest post. You can even go back through and look at some of your previous posts that maybe haven’t got a lot of page views recently. Maybe you can take that content and repurpose it and try again – you know, re-publish it again and then get rid of the old article. We don’t really want duplicate stuff on our website but we want to get rid of those low-quality guest posts, especially – or any low-quality post that you may have created yourself.

So, take a look over your site and, you know, you may have hundreds of posts. It may take a while to do this but that’s another recommendation to kind of make your website that much better this year.

Let’s see. Four more things I’ve got on my list.

We want to remove things that people don’t care about and this is easy to figure out or hard to figure out, depending. There’s a plugin out there – or a software package – that’s called Crazy Egg. And this will actually run a heat map on your website.

So you install it – or not really install it but you link your website with Crazy Egg account and then it automatically will see where people are clicking. And if they click on four of the seven menu items that you may have in your menu, then let’s get rid of those three that they’re not clicking on. If nobody’s ever clicking on sidebars or they’re never clicking on, you know, anything on the home page, like, let’s redesign the home page and figure out what we can do to make people actually click and use the – those home pages or those buttons or whatever. So, if people aren’t using them or they’re not clicking on them, let’s get rid of those.

We also want to make – take a look at how many ads you’re having on your website. If you’ve got too many ads, let’s remove some of them – especially if the ads aren’t making you any money. Like, if you have hundreds of ad spots across your website but you’re making 13 cents per day, like, that’s probably not the best conversion.

You know, you may want to try to pare it down and have less ad spots but make them look more fluent with your website, I guess – or kind of cohesive into your website. Maybe try to customize them so the colors look the same or just make them look more like your website so they’re not, like, this big, huge ad that’s out there. So, that’s another thing.

Two more:

We want to remove “Page Count Views”. This is something that, you know, we used to do way back in the day to show, like, “Oh, look. I have a thousand people that’ve come to my website in the past 14 years.” Like, we don’t need to be visually displaying this on the outside. We’ve got Google Analytics of Jetpack or some sort of stat system in place, so you can see that data but your visitors don’t need to see how many people are coming to your website. So, we want to remove those.

And the last thing is to remove long category or tag lists in the sidebar. Like, I don’t think that people come to a website and, like, “Oh. I want to look at all posts from January of 2014.” Like – and they’re going to scroll down this whole list of, you know – the sidebar with all of these things.

Like, those are the good things to add – you know, category lists or archive lists or things like that are great to add when you’re first starting out and you don’t have a lot of content and you’re trying to fill a little bit of space. But once you’ve been blogging for several years, like, and you have posts in every single month, we don’t need to see the archive category with, you know, 12 links for every post – or for every month – from the previous year. So that’s another thing to think about.

So these are all, like, just recommendations that some of the top names in websites in WordPress development have been talking about over the past couple years; just things that should be coming off our website.

I did a – I did the 5 things you need to remove for – in 2016. So now, I’ve upped my game a little bit and we’ll talk about these and I’ll try to do one of these recap posts every year, just to kind of keep up with the technology that’s out there and the things that are going on the website space.

So, that’s what I want to share with you this week. Next week, we’ll continue to talk about WordPress – the how to kind of get our sites ready for a great year and how to get those things up and running and do some really great things with our WordPress site in 2017.

Until next week, we’ll talk again soon. Take care. Bye-bye.