Sometimes, an old website ends up becoming something like an old closet. Junk piles up on top of itself and, eventually, you can’t even sort through the mess enough to find what you’re looking for. When you’re considering redesigning a website, one of the things you’ll want to consider is trimming back. If your website has been online for many years, there may very well be some pages that aren’t worth porting over to your new design. Here are some things to consider.

Useless Image Galleries
Sometimes, website owners will start putting up image galleries and, eventually, their entire website might look like the whole thing was intended to be a gallery. This is particularly true of sites that are used by photographers, video production companies and companies that invest a lot of money in PR. You may want to consider scaling back on the amount of image galleries you have on your site.

Look for those images that are no longer relevant to your site. For example, if you have a products page with pictures of your goods on it and some of them aren’t even available anymore, get rid of them. If you’re a photographer, you don’t need the pictures from somebody’s wedding from 15 years ago if you have better pictures that are more recent.

Another thing you’ll want to consider about this is whether a marketing image is actually hindering you. Here’s a classic example. Good realtors know that you should never run a picture of a property that was taken in the winter when you’re trying to market it in the summer. Your images should look current if they are being used to market a product in your inventory.

Written Content
If you’re a smart website owner, you’ve likely invested some money and having written content provided for you so you can add it to your site and increase your visibility on search engines. Search engines have changed a lot in recent years. In fact, some of the content that would’ve gotten you search engine attention in the past may now get you penalized by the search engines. Ask your web designer if they have a search engine optimization expert available or if they know one who can help you to cull the articles that aren’t doing you any good anymore.

A secondary benefit to doing this is that it gives you an opportunity to add better content to your site and, as anybody involved in search engine optimization knows, the search engines do like websites that tend to update regularly. Even though you might be getting rid of some content that you paid for, you’re essentially getting a win/win situation out of it.

Replace Old Forms
At one time, just about every Internet form took up its own page. This isn’t always necessary anymore. In fact, web designers can oftentimes integrate a simple contact form into a margin on a page or use other creative placements that allow you to get the most out of your screen space and that allow your visitors to provide you with lead information without having to navigate to a separate page. Have your website designer take a look at your forms and see if they can be streamlined, revamped or done away with altogether.

Sometimes, tending a garden means doing more pruning than planting. Websites are much the same. To take your website from an outdated state to a completely revamped version that really catches people’s attention and makes them want to hang around, consider what you might do away with and better uses for the resources and space that those pruned elements took up.

Matt Dandurand is the CEO of MediaContour.com, offering web design in Los Angeles, CA.