Your website is the face you present to the world at large—vast numbers of apartment searchers will form their first impressions of your property based on what you’ve made available online. And we all know how important first impressions are, don’t we?

Now, if you were meeting someone important for the first time, you’d want to look your best. You’d go out of the way to get cleaned up and dress in something nice. Similarly, if you were to have new guests over to your home, you’d probably tidy up a bit first. And you should take the same approach to your website—keep it clean and presentable at all times. Here’s a few tips to make sure that your site is putting your best face forward:

Keep your site structure orderly

Websites grow and evolve over time—it’s common for a site to gain some new pages after a few years on the internet, whether to answer new customer questions or advertise a temporary deal. It’s a good idea to take a look at your site map every once in a while to see everything that you’ve put online. Look for pages that no longer have a use or redundant pages that give the same information as other pages. If you find them, cut them out. Look for similar pages that you could consolidate into a single page for easier access, or for information-dense pages that could be split apart. For some great tips on cleaning up site structure, check out this article from Yoast¹.

Have your content professionally edited

Finding a glaring typo on an otherwise-professional website is a little like noticing a chunk of spinach in the teeth of the person you’re interviewing—it is distracting, embarrassing, and unprofessional. Get a professional writer or editor to go through your content with a fine-toothed comb. Think of it like hiring a cleaning service; yes, anyone can write, but it can be worth the expense to pay to have it done professionally. Don’t get caught with virtual spinach in your virtual teeth.

Check important content for dead links

It’s always frustrating to read an interesting article that ends with a link to more information, only to find that the link leads to a page that no longer exists. Go through all the content on your most visited pages and look for links that don’t work. If you can, replace them with working links; if the original content is gone and you can’t find a suitable replacement, then remove the link and re-write the text.

Remember, the goal of maintaining your site is to ensure that you’re always putting forth a competent and professional appearance. A little effort can go a long way to maintaining client confidence.

By: Christopher Baxter

¹https://yoast.com/how-to-clean-site-structure/