The garden centre I went to on Sunday had its gas-fired BBQs on offer, a sure sign that Christmas is on the horizon. It is the same for anyone involved in email marketing. Now is the time to clean your website to ensure it is in optimum condition.

This is not a simple case of emptying the cache, as that should be completed after the end of each email marketing campaign. We need to go a bit deeper to identify the flotsam we need to jettison. 

Pages that are no longer of use should be deleted, meaning that landing page that you’ve kept for months, just in case, should go. It is probable you will have a number of them just floating around doing nothing other than slowing your website.

Unless you are much more organised than I am you will have images that were uploaded in a rush and are not optimised. There’s no need to go through each one. Just check the loading times of your pages. Find out why any are found to be sluggish. Slow response times are a major cause of abandonment of a website.

Another reason is pop-ups. Have you added one or two as time has gone on? They can infuriate. It’s the same with repetition. If a visitor is confronted by the same copy every time they visit, they won’t bother returning.

Then there’s the way it looks. Is the appearance identical to the way it was a year ago? What hope, then, to inspire your visitors? You don’t want to change so much that your regulars are confused but enough to show that you are progressive. It is more than just changing colours or a WordPress theme.

Look at your site through new eyes, either literally by using a new member of staff, or trying to do it yourself. Is the site easy to navigate or have the additions over the last year made it bewildering?

If the end of the year is your biggest period for profits and sales, now is the time to optimise your website ready for your email marketing campaigns.