By Mehdi HassanRedesigns lose rankings and leads for a simple reason: nobody knew which old pages were doing the work. A two-year-old blog post brings in a steady trickle of demo requests, gets dropped because it doesn't fit the new look, and the leads quietly stop. A content audit is how you find those pages before the redesign touches anything.
What is a website content audit before a redesign?
A website content audit is a structured review of every page on your site, recording what it is, how it performs and what should happen to it in the redesign. It belongs early in the website design process, during or just after discovery, because its results decide the sitemap, the copy workload and the redirect plan.
It's different from an SEO audit, which looks at technical health such as crawlability and speed, though the two overlap. If search traffic matters to you, pair this with a pre-redesign SEO audit that captures rankings and backlinks before anything changes. A content audit asks a simpler question per page: is this worth keeping, and in what form?
What columns should a content audit template have?
A content audit template needs columns for identity, performance, quality and the decision. Keep it in a spreadsheet so anyone can sort and filter. Below are the columns we use; you can copy them straight into a new sheet.
Column | What goes in it | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
URL | The full address of the page | Crawl tool or CMS export |
Page type | Home, product, pricing, blog, landing, legal | Manual |
Owner | Who knows this page best | Manual |
Organic clicks (12 months) | Search clicks to the page | Search Console |
Conversions | Demo requests, signups or bookings it started | Analytics |
Backlinks | Referring domains pointing at the page | SEO tool |
Top query | The search term it gets most clicks for | Search Console |
Accuracy | Current, outdated or wrong | Manual review |
Decision | Keep, rewrite, merge or kill | Audit rules below |
New URL | Where it lives after launch, or its redirect target | Sitemap |
How do you do a content audit step by step?
To do a content audit, export every URL, add performance data, review each page against the decision rules and record one decision per row. For a typical startup site of a few dozen pages, this is a day or two of focused work. Larger blogs take longer, but the steps are the same.
Build the inventory
Crawl the site and export the CMS page list, then combine them. Crawls miss pages that nothing links to; CMS exports miss pages built outside the CMS. You need both.
Add performance data
Pull twelve months of organic clicks per URL from Search Console and conversions per landing page from analytics. Add referring domains from an SEO tool if you have one.
Review quality by hand
Read each page with meaningful traffic or conversions. Mark whether the information is current, whether it matches your new positioning and whether it overlaps another page.
Apply the decision rules
Give every row exactly one decision: keep, rewrite, merge or kill. Use the rules in the next section so decisions are consistent across reviewers.
Map new URLs
For every kept or rewritten page, record its new URL. For every merged or killed page, record the redirect target. This column becomes your redirect map.
Hand off
Share the sheet with whoever writes the copy and whoever builds the sitemap. Rewrites become copy tasks; kept pages become migration tasks.
Should you keep, update or remove each page?
Keep pages that perform and are accurate, rewrite pages that perform but are outdated, merge pages that compete for the same topic, and kill pages with no traffic, no conversions, no links and no purpose. The trick is that performance protects a page even when it looks bad. Design can change; the search value and the reason it converts shouldn't be thrown away.
Decision | When to choose it | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
Keep | Gets traffic or conversions, content is accurate and on-message | Migrate as is, same URL if possible |
Rewrite | Gets traffic or conversions, but outdated or off-message | New copy, keep the URL and the topic it ranks for |
Merge | Two or more pages cover the same topic and split traffic | Combine into the strongest URL, redirect the rest |
Kill | No traffic, conversions or links, and no business purpose | Remove and redirect to the closest relevant page |
A few edge cases come up in almost every audit. Legal pages, careers and contact pages are kept regardless of traffic, because they have a job. Pages with backlinks but no traffic are usually merged rather than killed, so the links still count. And pages that convert well from paid campaigns may have no organic traffic at all, which is why the conversions column matters as much as clicks. For a migration rather than a redesign, the same logic applies; our guide to a content audit before migration covers platform-specific details.
For example: auditing a hypothetical 40-page SaaS site
For example, suppose a SaaS company has 40 URLs: 8 core pages, 4 old landing pages and 28 blog posts. The audit finds that 6 posts drive almost all organic clicks and 2 of them start most blog-sourced demo requests. Those 6 are kept or rewritten with their URLs unchanged.
Nine posts cover three overlapping topics, so they're merged into three stronger articles. Eleven posts and three landing pages have no traffic, conversions or links, so they're killed and redirected. The new sitemap ends up with fewer pages, a much smaller copy workload, and a redirect map that's already finished before design begins.
What are common content audit mistakes?
The most common content audit mistake is judging pages by appearance instead of by data. An ugly old page that brings in leads is worth more than a polished one nobody visits. Other mistakes come from rushing the inventory or skipping the redirect column.
- Missing orphan pages. Pages that nothing links to won't show up in a crawl, but may still rank.
- Killing without redirecting. A deleted page with backlinks or rankings needs a redirect to the closest relevant page.
- Rewriting what ranks without care. Keep the topic and main query when you rewrite, or you may lose the ranking you're trying to protect.
- No owner for rewrites. Decide who writes the website copy before the audit hands over dozens of rewrite tasks.
How does the content audit feed the rest of the redesign?
The audit's output becomes three working documents: the new sitemap, the copy brief and the redirect map. Kept and rewritten pages form the sitemap. Rewrites, with their target queries and notes on what's outdated, form the copy brief. The new URL column, filtered to merged and killed pages, is the redirect map your developer implements and tests at launch.
It also gives you a baseline. After launch, compare clicks and conversions per page with the audit numbers to see whether the redesign helped. And it sets up a habit: our guide on how often to update website content explains how to keep the sheet alive as a quarterly review instead of a one-off. For the full redesign sequence around it, see the website redesign checklist.
