Taking inspiration from Marie Kondo and de-cluttering your website

If you’ve heard the phrase ‘does this spark joy’ you’ve probably come across Marie Kondo. The Japanese tidying expert, who struck fame through a Netflix series, has made it her mission to bring joy through the art of decluttering and organising.

And if you have a large website, then those same KonMari philosophies could be usefully applied, either on an ongoing basis or at the outset of a major content initiative.

Some of Marie Kondo’s best tips for organizing objects are just as true for organizing websites. Here, we take a look at six of the tidying guru's ideas, and consider how you could apply them to optimise your website content.

Commit to the tidy up

The task of tidying up your website content might seem daunting. Marie Kondo challenges us to change this mindset. Rather than thinking about what you don’t want, instead focus on what you do want.

Every website uses content to fulfil a range of strategic objectives. You should seek clarity on this,and get yourself ready for de-cluttering.

Discard first

Before you embark on creating new content, your first step should be to take away any unnecessary content. Undertake a content audit, remove unnecessary pages, and condense your page content.

Tidy by category, not by location

This is a fundamental aspect of the KonMari methodology. Instead of organising room by room, Marie Kondo says you should organise by categories, one at a time.

It’s tempting to jump straight into deleting website content, treating each page as its own island. Instead, you could analyse the different components of your site and review the variation in how they are used to determine which content should be retained, which content should be improved and which content should be deleted.

Tidy in the right order

Marie Kondo underlines the importance of tidying in the right sequence. For households it’s clothes, books, papers, miscellaneous items followed by sentimental items. In the case of your website it could be homepage, landing pages, high traffic pages, then strategically important content pages.

Ask yourself, will it spark joy

This is what Marie Kondo’s philosophy urges you to ask yourself about every object in your home.

For your site, there may be lots of content that simply needs to transfer information. But even the seemingly mundane such as a 404 page can have personality and engage audiences.

Your home should be a place that sparks joy. Your website can too.