Websites grow by accretion. A page is added for a campaign, another for a service that was later dropped, a third because someone asked. Years later the site has 200 pages, a quarter of them out of date, several that say the same thing in different words, and a few that are the only reason anyone visits.

A content audit is how you take control of that. It does not need special software. It needs a spreadsheet, an hour of data gathering and a willingness to make decisions.

1. Decide what the site is for

Write down the three jobs the site has to do, for example "get enquiries for the design service", "answer the questions that cause support emails" and "show recent work". Every page will be judged against these. A page that serves none of them is a candidate for removal, however much effort went into it.

2. List every page

Make an inventory with one row per page. You can start from the sitemap, a crawl of the site or an export from the content management system. Include:

  • the address and the page title;
  • the type of page, such as service, article, case study or legal;
  • who is responsible for it;
  • when it was last changed;
  • which of the site's jobs it serves.

3. Add a few numbers

Do not collect every metric available. A handful is enough to separate useful pages from unused ones:

  • visits over the last twelve months;
  • enquiries, sign-ups or sales that began on the page;
  • search impressions and clicks from Google Search Console;
  • how many other pages and sites link to it.

The numbers do not decide anything alone. A page with few visits can be vital, such as a terms page or a niche service. They tell you where to look first.

4. Review each page with four questions

  1. Is it accurate? Check prices, names, opening hours, features and anything that has a date.
  2. Does it have a clear purpose and audience? If you cannot say who it is for, neither can a visitor.
  3. Is it unique? If another page covers the same ground, one of them is redundant.
  4. Does it work? Is it readable on a phone, quick to load, accessible and free of broken links?

5. Choose one of four actions

  • Keep. The page is accurate, useful and well made. Leave it, and note when to review it again.
  • Improve. The purpose is right but the page is weak or out of date. Update it, rewrite it or restructure it. Pages that already earn visits or links are the best place to spend effort.
  • Merge. Several pages overlap, or a page is too thin to stand alone. Combine them into one stronger page and redirect the old addresses to it.
  • Remove. The page serves no purpose, describes something that no longer exists or duplicates another. Delete it and redirect it to the nearest relevant page. If there is nothing relevant, let it return a "gone" response instead of redirecting everything to the home page.

Some rules of thumb. Never delete a page with inbound links or steady traffic without a redirect. Do not merge pages that answer different questions just because they share a topic. Use a "noindex" instruction only for pages that visitors need but search engines do not, such as thank-you pages and internal search results.

6. Redirect and tidy

Removal is where audits go wrong. For every page you merge or remove:

  • add a permanent (301) redirect from the old address to the new one;
  • update links inside your own site, so that visitors are not sent through redirects;
  • take the page out of menus and the sitemap;
  • avoid chains, where one redirect leads to another;
  • keep a record of old and new addresses, so that you can check and reverse it later.

After the changes go live, click through the redirects and check Search Console for new errors.

7. Fill the gaps

An audit also shows what is missing. Read the questions that customers ask by email and chat, and look at the searches that bring people to the site and the ones that end with no useful page. Each repeated question is a candidate for a new page or a new section.

8. Plan the upkeep

Give every important page an owner and a review date, usually every six to twelve months. Change the date shown on a page only when the content has really changed, because a fresh date on an unchanged page misleads readers.

Common mistakes

  • Judging pages by traffic alone and deleting the quiet but important ones.
  • Removing pages without redirects and losing the visitors and links they had.
  • Rewriting everything at once, when the improvements that matter are on a handful of pages.
  • Auditing once and never again.