Question about smart lights and regular switches

Hi, I have a question what to do about smart lights and how to deal with regular switches that were controlling the normal lights before.

I have hue lights in my basement, 16 of them which I naturally control through my Google home. For the switches that were there before I just removed them, and tied together the black and red wires to basically make it a fully connected current so nobody ever thinks to flip any switches for no reason.

I am asking this question because my electricity bill has been high for a while and I recently looked and it claims that lighting is 40% estimated of all my usage. We don't leave the lights "on" permanently or anything and I don't think our lighting is out of the ordinary in terms of usage.

Am I doing the correct thing or no?