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What should you decide before starting a content audit?
Set the audit’s scope first: the whole website, one section, a planned redesign or a specific cleanup. Identify the people who own, maintain and approve the material. That gives the team a workable boundary and a route for resolving questions about accuracy, retention or removal. Tulane’s content-audit guidance recommends prioritizing the work and involving relevant stakeholders.
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A content audit is an examination of existing content—what it says, who it serves, who maintains it and how it performs its intended role. It can reveal what to retain and what the new site needs, but it is not itself a redesign. Mass.gov puts the distinction plainly: “A content audit is not a redesign.”
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What does each page help someone do?
Build an inventory before deciding what to cut. List pages and relevant files, including each item’s title and URL. Record who owns it, when it was last reviewed or updated, where people enter it, and the task or purpose it serves. A site crawl can help produce a comprehensive list; a spreadsheet is enough to record findings and decisions. Digital.gov’s content-goals guidance describes using an inventory to understand content, ownership, task flows, gaps and redundancies.
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For each item, ask:
- Who is the intended audience, and what are they trying to do?
- Is the information accurate, current and complete?
- Can people use it, including people with disabilities?
- Can users find it through navigation, search or links from other pages?
- Does another page already meet the same need?
- Who can verify and maintain it?
Check for outdated or duplicated material, missing information, broken links and barriers to completing a task. Audit guidance from Oregon’s Design Guide and Mass.gov treats usefulness, accuracy, accessibility and findability as relevant considerations—not just page counts or visits.
Should low-traffic pages be removed?
Not on traffic figures alone. A page with few visits may serve a small but important audience, answer a specialized question or support a task that is not visible in aggregate traffic. Tulane’s guidance says, “Do not remove a page solely because it receives limited traffic.” First establish what the page is for, whether that need remains, and whether people can get the information elsewhere.
Traffic can be one clue, but it does not settle the decision. Consider it alongside accuracy, usefulness, accessibility, links, ownership and the consequences of losing the material. The available guidance does not establish a universal traffic threshold or a numerical formula for deciding what to remove.
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What action should you assign to each item?
Give every audited page or file one explicit action. A practical set of outcomes is:
- Keep: The content is useful, accurate and maintainable as it stands.
- Update: The need remains, but specified facts, links, language or accessibility issues must be corrected.
- Consolidate: Overlapping pages should become one authoritative resource. Decide which information survives and where users should go.
- Remove: The item no longer serves a user need, and removal has been checked for links, retention and approval consequences.
- Create: The audit exposed a meaningful gap that existing content does not address.
Write down the reason and, where relevant, the owner and next action. This turns the inventory into a plan rather than a list of pages. You may add a local priority score to help sequence work, but treat it as your team’s decision aid—not a validated formula for content value or redesign results. Tulane’s audit guidance describes action categories and prioritization; Digital.gov highlights using audit findings to identify gaps and inform a sitemap.
What should you ask before removing or combining a page?
Check the consequences before unpublishing or changing a URL. For each removal or consolidation, confirm:
- Replacement: Is there a current page that fully meets the same need? If not, should the content be updated or replaced instead?
- Links: Which internal pages, navigation items or external sites point to the old URL? Update links you control.
- Redirect: If users or search engines still reach the old address, where should it lead? For a consolidation, redirect the old URL to the consolidated destination where appropriate.
- Retention: Does the content need to be retained for legal, policy, operational or other organizational reasons?
- Approval: Does the content owner or another subject-matter or leadership reviewer need to approve the change?
These checks help avoid turning a tidy-up into a dead end for people who bookmarked a page, followed an old link or rely on its information. Tulane’s guidance covers replacement content, links, redirects, retention and approvals; Google Search Central’s site-move guidance explains using redirects when URLs change, including when old pages are consolidated.
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How should audit findings shape the redesign?
Use the audit to understand the tasks, gaps and relationships the redesigned site needs to support. If several pages answer the same question, plan a clearer authoritative destination. If users need information that does not exist, account for it in the content plan. If important material is difficult to find, revisit navigation and page relationships rather than assuming that deleting it solves the problem.
Then translate those findings into an information architecture and content plan. The audit establishes what exists and what needs to change; design and testing determine how the new experience should work. Digital.gov describes using content goals and audit findings to inform task flows and a sitemap, while Oregon’s Design Guide places content auditing in the redesign process.
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What should you test after the changes go live?
Review the changed experience on desktop and mobile. Check that navigation and internal links work, redirects lead to relevant destinations, and important content remains findable. Test the tasks the affected pages were meant to support, rather than checking only whether pages load. For a site move involving URL changes, Google recommends monitoring analytics and server logs; see its site-move guidance.
Keep the inventory and decisions available to the people responsible for maintaining the new site. That record makes ownership and future review clearer, and gives the team a reference when content needs to change again.
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