What to leave off a link page

A page is judged by its worst link

Nobody audits a link page. A visitor taps one thing, and what they find decides how they read the rest. A dead link near the top teaches them that nothing here is current, and that lesson is then applied to the links that still work perfectly. Removal is the cheapest edit available and the one nobody ever schedules.

Most of what follows is not on your page because you decided to put it there. It is there because it made sense once and nothing ever came off again. That is a different problem from bad taste, and it has a simpler fix.

The list to delete

Open your own page on a phone and go down it once with this beside you.

• Any link you have not opened yourself in six months. Open it now. A surprising share of them lead somewhere you did not expect.
• A link back to the profile the visitor just came from. They arrived from Instagram; offering them Instagram is a loop.
• A wall of full-width social buttons. Six platforms as six big rows eat half a screen that one compact icon row handles better.
• Anything that needs an app the visitor does not have. A deep link into an uninstalled app opens a store listing, and the visit usually ends there.
• Paragraphs. If a link takes more than a line to explain, the explanation belongs on a real page that this one points at.
• A phone number typed as plain text. Nobody copies digits off a screen with a thumb. A messenger button does the same job in one tap.
• Announcements whose date has passed. The sale ended, the stream happened, the pre-order closed, the room is booked.
• The same destination twice under two names. "Shop" and "New collection" on one address is one link and one wasted row.
• Personal data you never meant to publish: a street in a photo, a second number in a screenshot, a full name you use only with clients.

Deleting is not the only move available. Anything seasonal can be switched off instead, which keeps its wording and its image ready for the next time it matters. Hidden is not the same as gone, and it removes the last excuse for leaving a stale block standing.

The two that cost the most

Two entries on that list deserve more than one line. The first is the loop back to the profile the visitor arrived from. It looks like completeness — every channel represented — but the person tapping it is already on that channel. It occupies the position where the link that actually pays you would sit.

The second is the duplicate destination. It is invisible to you, because you know both labels mean the same thing. It is confusing to a visitor, who assumes two labels mean two different things and eventually picks the wrong one. Check by address rather than by name: duplicates hide behind different wording, not behind different links. The most common one is an old shop link and a newer shop link carrying a campaign tag.

The privacy pass

The last item is not about tidiness. Images carry more than you intended — a street sign, a door number, a screenshot with a notification bar still in it. Uploaded images have their EXIF stripped here, so the camera location does not travel with the file, but nothing can remove what is visible inside the frame. View your own images at full size once.

The same pass applies to the bio line and the note lines under links. A city is fine, a street is not. A work number is fine, the one your family answers is not. A page on a public address is public to anyone who guesses the address, not only to the people you send it to. An address is rarely guessed, but a page is forwarded constantly, and anyone can forward it.