A website is essentially a series of images and text held together on the back end by code. The code tells each and every image and piece of text where and how to show up in a browser. The code communicates with a browser and tells it exactly what it wants the browser to do.

Code can also execute other functions in regards to a website but for the purpose of this article we are sticking with the aspect of code that is responsible for serving websites on a web browser.

When Google or some other search engine spiders your website they are looking for a few things. They are indexing your content, your images and they are surfing the site as a real life human would. They take all three of these factors and combine them to help decide where your site should show up in their search rankings. If all three of the aspects mentioned above are not optimal, then your search ranking will suffer.

Websites made today interact with browsers differently than say a website built ten years ago does. This is because websites built ten years ago were designed to interact with spiders and browsers from, well, ten years ago. A ten year old website today will have some superfluous code which clutters the non-visible part of the site. Search engine spiders hate code junk.

It is probably a good idea to have your website redesigned at least every five years. And I mean from the bottom up. This will keep you competitive in a few ways: 1) Customers see that you have a sleek and modern website and will trust you more. 2) Search engine spiders see that your site is optimized and they reward you for your efforts.

Here are the characteristics of good clean code:

1. Clean Code is Efficient – It’s lean and clean and doesn’t waste time. Does your site load fast?
2. Clean Code is Easy to Maintain – If you have a cleanly coded website, then it should be easy for a coder or developer to work on. This saves him/her time and you money.
3. Clean Code is Reliable – Sites with clean code break less and have much less down-time. For a small business being down for half a day may not be that big of a deal, but can you image in a site like Amazon went down for half a day? Millions of dollars would be lost.

In summary, we hope you found this article helpful. An updated website with clean code is the only way to run a business.

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