Our 15 Best Cleaning Tips of 2024

Put everything away in the right spot, right away

If it takes you less than a minute to put something in the right spot, do it right away. Taking an extra few steps to deliver your dirty dishes to the sink, dirty clothes to the hamper, or mail to the recycle bin can minimize clutter and speed up cleaning. This is a habit worth cultivating, according to cleaning pros.

Vacuum your upholstered furniture

You probably drag the vacuum out regularly to keep your rugs and floors dust and pet hair free, but how often do you run the upholstery tool over your sofas, soft chairs, and headboards? Taking a few minutes to vacuum the furniture when you’re vacuuming floors can help prevent pet hair, food crumbs, and other dirt and grime from lodging into the fibers of your sofa.

Follow the “didn’t know” rule for decluttering

To be honest, this decluttering rule is totally genius. As you’re going through your closet or your junk drawer, any “surprise” finds that you didn’t know you had are likely things that you’re not really missing in your life. So go ahead and give yourself permission to ditch anything you didn’t know you had (and therefore, won’t miss!).

Let your cleaning products do the heavy lifting

Get your money’s worth out of your cleaning products. Spray them on, then wait a few minutes to let them settle in and work on the gunk and grime. You’ll be able to clear even the toughest messes with just a quick swipe, rather than a scrub.

Don’t use vinegar on every single surface

Vinegar has been a fan favorite natural cleaning product for years. After all, it does tend to get things clean and sparkly—especially glass. But it isn’t a one-size-fits-all cleaner, as it can etch stone countertops and damage wood floors, and vinegar doesn’t disinfect like other cleaners can. So while vinegar deserves a place in your arsenal, if you’re looking to disinfect—or have surfaces that are sensitive to vinegar–it’s best to look elsewhere for your cleaners.

Streamline your cleaning products

More isn’t necessarily better when it comes to cleaning products—and odds are, many of the specialized products in your cleaning caddy could be replaced by a single, all-purpose cleaner. In addition to saving money, you’ll also reduce the clutter under your kitchen or bathroom sinks and minimize the chances that you’ll create a dangerous chemical interaction by mixing ammonia and bleach or other incompatible cleaners.

Load your dishwasher the right way

One of the biggest cleaning-related controversies that’s led to many a household argument: How to place your dishes in the dishwasher so they actually get clean the first time. This year, we settled the score with the definitive guide to placing dishes in the dishwasher—including whether you really need to rinse the dishes before you load them. (Our expert says you can skip it!)

Organize your kitchen for meal prep

Let’s face it: Those fancy coffee stations are only the beginning of how you can organize your kitchen to make your life work so much more smoothly. You can put all the baking ingredients and tools together, or put everything you need to pack lunches in a set of drawers and shelves, so you don’t have to hunt all over the kitchen for your baking powder or your thermos.

Prioritize Like a Cleaning Pro

You may be focused on getting your countertops and floors sparkling, but high-touch areas like your doorknobs, cabinet pulls, and light switches can become a major spot for grime, germs, and other grossness. Make sure you give them a good wipe-down with a disinfectant when you’re doing the rest of your cleaning.

Layer in home scents mindfully

It can be way too easy to overdo it with home fragrances, with a lemony kitchen cleaner, lavender candle, and a powder-fresh fabric deodorizer. Opt to stick within a similar fragrance family in everything from your dish detergent to your candles, and look for more natural ways to provide the scent—such as essential oils or fresh flowers—to avoid overpowering people who visit your home.

Put dirty dishes in a drying rack, not the sink

If you’ve ever had to deal with a Jenga-like stack of dishes in your sink as you’re trying to wash vegetables for dinner or just load the dishwasher, this tip is for you: Opt to put the dirty dishes in the drying rack instead, leaving your sink clear and ready for anything else.

Work your way from top to bottom

Our favorite cleaning pros consistently say that you’ll want to start your cleaning chores at the top of the room (ceiling fans and tops of bookshelves!), then work your way down to the floor at the end. That way, you avoid having to re-clean a floor after dust bunnies waft down from the blinds.

Micro-declutter your way to a cleaner home

Yeah, we’ve all seen those grand decluttering challenges that have you dedicating hours or days to making big shifts and big piles of things that need to go now. But micro-decluttering—where you focus on one small bit of your home for just five to 10 minutes at a time—can still get you there without sacrificing weekends to the cause.

Digitize your paper clutter

One of the big benefits of our tech-filled lives: You can probably ditch the paper clutter once and for all. People who live in tiny homes swear by e-readers rather than shelves of books, and suggest scanning and saving papers, rather than taking up big filing cabinets.

Bonus: One easy way to tell if you really need a piece of paper? If it’s worth the hassle to go ahead and scan it.

Run an air purifier to minimize dust

We’re big fans of using tech to do the work for us, whether it’s a mop-vacuum combo that handles two chores in one sweep, or a robo-vac that does the work for us. But air purifiers may be one of our absolute favorites: They pull dust, pet dander, and other particles from the air, help reduce the smells from dinner or that nasty litter box—and can even take care of pollen and microbes in the air, too.