Guide Redesign and launch
Website content audit: what to keep, fix or remove before a redesign
By Studio Swing
A content audit gives every page on your current site one decision and one owner. You list every page, add what each one earns you (visits from Google, enquiries, links from other sites), judge whether it is accurate and useful, and then mark it keep, update, merge, move or retire. Doing it before a redesign matters because those decisions set the new site's scope: what must be carried across, what must be written, and which old addresses need a redirect. A site that skips the audit may rebuild everything, including the pages that should have gone.
On this page
- 01What does an audit look like for a real site
- 02How is an audit different from an inventory
- 03Step 1: List every page
- 04Step 2: Add the evidence
- 05Step 3: Judge each page
- 06Step 4: Give every page a verdict
- 07What mistakes should you avoid
- 08What does the audit hand to the redesign
- 09What this guide will not tell you
- 10The content audit checklist
- 11Where to go from here
- 12Sources
What does an audit look like for a real site?
This guide is the how-to for existing sites. If you are planning content for a site that does not exist yet, read planning your website content instead.
Say you run a commercial cleaning company. The site has sixty pages, built up over nine years by three different people. There are service pages, news items from past seasons, a team page, a few PDFs, and two pages that both describe carpet cleaning, written years apart. You are about to redesign it.
Without an audit, someone decides which pages to carry across by opening the old menu, and the menu does not show what is on the site. The forgotten price list that three other websites link to is not in the menu. Neither is the old page that quietly brings in most of your enquiries. An audit finds both before the design budget is spent on pages nobody needs.
How is an audit different from an inventory?
The Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g), a usability research firm, defines a content inventory as "a list of every piece of digital content you currently have," and a content audit as the step that "examines, assesses, and evaluates the quality of the content listed in the inventory." The inventory is the list. The audit is the judgment. In a redesign, the two together help a team "determine what content to carry over and what to leave behind." You need both, and the audit is the part that takes thought.
Step 1: List every page
Start with a complete list, including the pages nobody remembers. Google's guidance for site moves suggests building the list from several places at once: your sitemaps, server logs, analytics and the content management system itself. Add to those the pages Google Search Console shows receiving clicks, and walk the live site for anything that none of them knows about. PDFs, forms, old campaign pages and image files that other sites embed all count.
NN/g recommends a spreadsheet, and lists the columns worth recording: the title, the address, who owns it, its subject, its format (page, PDF, video), when it was created or last changed, and its metadata, such as the page title and description. Keep it in one shared file so the whole team sees the same list.
Step 2: Add the evidence
A page's value is not visible from reading it. Add four columns of facts:
- Clicks from Google. Search Console's Performance report shows clicks per page and the searches behind them. Set the date filter to the longest range, 16 months, so seasonal pages are not mistaken for dead ones, and export it. This also becomes your before-and-after baseline.
- Actions that matter to the business. From your analytics, record which pages lead to an enquiry, a booking or a sale. In Google Analytics these are tracked as key events, Google's term for actions that are particularly important to your business. If nothing is tracked, ask the people who answer the phone which pages customers mention.
- Links from other websites. A backlink tool or your developer can list the pages other sites link to. A page with links from respected sites is worth keeping or redirecting even when it gets few visits.
- Last updated, and by whom. An old date is a prompt to check the page, not proof it is wrong.
NN/g's own list of performance measures includes clicks, views and bounce rates. Use whatever you actually have, and write down what you do not have, so a blank is a known gap rather than a zero.
Step 3: Judge each page
For each page, answer five questions. They take a minute for a simple page and longer for a complex one.
- Is it true today? Prices, services, opening hours, staff, terms and photographs go out of date quietly. Google's self-assessment questions for helpful content ask whether a page has "any easily-verified factual errors."
- Does it help someone do or learn something? Google asks whether content gives a "substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic," and whether it was created primarily to help people. A page that exists to fill a gap in the menu usually fails this.
- Is it the only page answering that question? Two pages that answer the same question compete with each other and leave visitors unsure which to trust. Our guide to separate pages for every city or keyword explains when separate pages are worth it.
- Is it written clearly? NN/g's criteria include plain language, clear headings, short chunks of text, good contrast and avoiding text embedded in images.
- Does it fit what the new site is for? This depends on a plan. Our guide to planning a website redesign covers the decisions that come first. A page can be well written and still have no place in the new structure.
Add one note per page: what is wrong, in a sentence. NN/g advises that for any page marked for update, you "document what exactly needs to be done to improve it and assign an owner to the task." A verdict with no named person and no description is a wish, not a task.
Step 4: Give every page a verdict
NN/g uses three statuses: keep, update or remove. A redesign adds options, because a page can also move, merge or be rewritten. These are six verdicts a redesign uses, and what each means for the address:
| Verdict | When it applies | What happens to the address |
|---|---|---|
Keep | Accurate, useful, earning its place | Stays as it is |
Update | Right topic, but facts, wording or layout need work | Stays; the page is edited in place |
Merge | Two or more pages answer the same question | One survives; the others redirect to it |
Move | A good page that belongs elsewhere in the new structure | New address; the old one redirects to it |
Rewrite | The topic is right and most of the text is not | Usually stays; the content is replaced |
Retire | Out of date, no longer offered, nothing replaces it | Returns "not found"; redirects only if a close equivalent exists |
Figure 7. Six verdicts.
A retired page is a legitimate decision. Google treats a 404 and a 410 the same way: it removes the address from its index and visits it less over time. If a page was retired because the thing it described is gone, an honest "not found" serves a visitor better than a redirect to something unrelated. Google's guidance for site moves advises against redirecting many old pages to one irrelevant destination such as the homepage.
When we run a redesign, every existing page gets a written verdict of this kind, and every address that moves gets a redirect record. For the redirect side, see redesigning a website without losing search traffic.
What mistakes should you avoid?
- Judging by visits alone. A delivery-terms page may get few visits and still answer the question that closes a sale. Read the clicks, the actions and the links together.
- Deleting a page that other sites link to. The links lead to an error and their value for your site is lost. Redirect it, or update it in place at the same address, as with the old price list in the example.
- Changing dates to look fresh. Google's guidance warns against "changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed." Update a page's date when the page has really changed.
- Treating a seasonal page as dead. A page about winter floor care will have no clicks in July. This is why the 16-month range matters.
- Starting with the whole site. NN/g advises starting with high-impact, frequently visited content. On a large site, audit the pages that bring visits and enquiries first, then work outward.
- Auditing alone. NN/g recommends establishing ownership and reviewing findings with stakeholders. The person who answers customer questions often knows which pages mislead them.
What does the audit hand to the redesign?
The finished sheet feeds four things:
- The address map. Every move, merge and retirement becomes a row in it, ready for redirects.
- The content to write. Pages marked update or rewrite become the writing list, with an owner for each. Our guide to planning your website content covers who writes what and in what order.
- The page list for the new site. Combined with your plan, the kept and merged pages become the structure.
- The cost. The mix of keep, update and rewrite is one of the biggest levers on what a redesign costs, as covered in how much a website redesign costs.
What this guide will not tell you
An audit shows what you have and how it performs. It does not show which topics are worth owning that you have no page for, and that takes search research of its own. It cannot tell you in advance how many pages you will cut. A tool can fill in the numbers columns quickly, but it cannot judge whether a page is accurate or useful, and that part needs a person who knows the business. NN/g also notes that audits are never really finished and need continuous monitoring, so in our view a yearly review is more realistic than a one-off project.
The content audit checklist
Checklist
- List every page, PDF and form, from sitemaps, analytics, Search Console, your content system and a walk of the live site.
- Put them in one shared spreadsheet with title, address, format, owner, last updated and metadata.
- Export Search Console clicks per page over 16 months and add them.
- Add the actions that matter from analytics, and the sites that link to each page.
- Mark every fact on each page as current or out of date.
- Spot pages that answer the same question as another page.
- Write one sentence per page on what is wrong with it.
- Give each page one verdict: keep, update, merge, move, rewrite or retire.
- Name an owner for every update and rewrite.
- Do not change dates unless the page really changed.
- Check pages with links from other sites before retiring them.
- Keep the sheet after launch, as your baseline and as next year's starting point.
Where to go from here
With the verdicts in hand, the next step is deciding what the new site must do: planning a website redesign covers it. To protect the pages that earn traffic through a move, use redesigning a website without losing search traffic.
Our website redesign and migration service includes a decision for every existing page, and you can discuss your project with us without preparing a technical brief.
Sources
Nielsen Norman Group, a usability researcher, "Content Inventory and Auditing 101" (2020): https:/
Google Search Central, "Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content": https:/
Google Search Central, "Site moves with URL changes": https:/
Google Search Central, "How HTTP status codes, and network and DNS errors affect Google Search": https:/
Google Search Central, "Debugging drops in Google Search traffic" (Search Console date range of 16 months): https:/
Google Analytics Help, "About key events": https:/
Search Console Help, "Performance report (Search results)": https:/