Every year around this time, I clean a closet – the same one every year, the one where I store Christmas decorations.

I always manage to pull the decorations I want out of the closet in December. But when I go to put them back in January, some warp in the space-time continuum has done away with the space where they came from. Thus the annual cleaning.

I don’t much enjoy going through a year’s detritus, deciding what to keep and what to toss. (Oh, dear, what to do with Aunt Sophie’s china elephant?) I do, however, enjoy having a closet where I can find everything. So I bite the bullet and Just Do It.

Q: How is a website like a junk closet?

A: They both need regular cleaning.

Unlike junk closets, websites always have more room. Everything I say below assumes that you’re adding new material all the time. You’ve come “in with the new,” but you haven’t gone “out with the old.” Thus, to find what they’re looking for, users have to shift through last year’s detritus. The question is whether they have the patience to do so.

Hint: They don’t.

If you squander web users’ precious time, they’re gone. One broken link, one whiff of dated content, one extra step toward what the user wants to do, and you have lost that user, possibly forever.

At least a couple of times a year, you must go through your entire website to make sure all the information is current and everything is working the way it’s supposed to.

The most important thing to look for is processes that have gotten more complicated than they need to be – say, having to click from “Registration” to the event calendar and only then to the actual registration page. Make it easy for your web guests to get where they’re going.

Beyond that, it’s simple housekeeping. Go through the entire site looking for:

• Out-of-date news, announcements, or information
• Broken links
• Broken widgets
• Blank spaces where there should be a widget or a menu or some other thing that you thought was on all the pages in this section

Some places where you are likely to find outdated materials and broken links:

• Staff, board, and other personnel lists
• Calendar or announcement pages, unless you have a dynamic system that automatically archives older material
• The links page, if you still have one, and link-heavy lists of resources
• Press / media kits

Make these pages your priority – but you still have to look at every page. It’s amazing how a simple “About” page gets to be “About What We Used to Do” when no one is looking. (Must be that space-time continuum acting up again.)

The good news is that you don’t have to tackle the whole website all at once. You can do a few pages each day. You should be able to use your content management system (WordPress, Drupal, or the like) to fix the problems as you find them.

You also don’t have to check all blog posts, though it might be a good idea to click into a few old posts at random to see if that missing-widget problem crops up.

You probably won’t much enjoy going through every page to make sure it’s up to date. But think of the satisfaction of having a website where users can find everything – and where nothing is the virtual equivalent of last year’s inexplicable gift from Aunt Sophie.