It’s Spring here in New England and that typically means Spring cleaning. When you think of Spring Cleaning, don’t just think of all the cleaning to be done in your home but also on your website. Yup! It’s time to spring clean your website! WordPress websites should be reviewed at a minimum of monthly to see if there are any updates to any core files or any plugins. You should be completing a backup of your site, whether manually or through a plugin such as Updraft. If you want to know more, check out my post about the 10 Essentials of the Weekly Backup. I prefer to visit each site I maintain weekly and sometimes twice weekly, depending on the traffic and updates. But every quarter, I look around at a few extra things to see what might need to be done. Sort of a Spring Cleaning for your WordPress site. One thing I always try to review; the latest images added to a site. Sometimes these are added in haste or sometimes they are missed but each image should have some additional information added to it.
Image Alt Tags
We’ve talked about how to drive traffic to your site using SEO but did you know that each image on your site should have it’s own SEO? Don’t ignore those images. Google is super powerful and they capture and complete searched on images but they can’t do so if your image name is IMG2307.jpg. It’s just doesn’t know what to categorize that as. So when you are adding in an image, always fill out the following areas:
Alternative Text – This is the most important piece of SEO data you can add to an image. Not only will this help with SEO but this is going to help those that can’t see your image. (win-win!) If your image doesn’t load or if your visitor uses a screen reader, this is what that screen reader is going to pull from. So make sure it makes sense. In my image, if I left the Image Alt Tag as ‘mop and bucket’, a visitor may move along and now read about why I put on an image of a mop and bucket on my WordPress Web Designer page. So, make sure it makes sense. Be descriptive but don’t ‘stuff’ your image with tons of repetitive words.
Title – This is pulled directly from your image name. I always like to rename images before uploading to WordPress. Again, I use something that is relevant to the image.
Caption – You can see in my image above that I’ve left the Caption blank. I don’t want anything under my image but if you do, you would add it directly there. So, if I wanted to, I could add something in like: Updating your WordPress Images is like Spring Cleaning – best to be done at least once a year.
Description – Be descriptive. Each image on a WordPress site get their own page (aren’t they special!). And if someone stumbles across just that page, they would know what that image is about. It’s true, you can find each individual page for each image just under the description, labeled File URL. So, add in some relevant information about your site, about the image. Be descriptive.
So next time you are thinking about spring cleaning, make sure you make time for your own website. Take a look around and see what can be updated, what can be added to, what can be changed or tweaked. You’ll be surprised at some of the small changes you can make to your site that will make it cleaner, fresher and maybe even smell better. 🙂