Triage.
The content audit is the least glamorous hour of any redesign and the one that decides it. It normally lives in a spreadsheet with four thousand rows, which is why it normally does not get finished. This is the same job as a deck of cards: one page in front of you, four keys, no scrolling, no columns. Sort until you run out of pages, then take the answer away as a spreadsheet.
One page at a time · Four keys · No spreadsheet
Decide every page on the site, fast enough to actually finish.
Paste your pages below, one per line: a URL list, or a crawl export with titles and traffic beside each row. Then keep, merge, rewrite or kill each one and take the answer away as a spreadsheet. Nothing you paste leaves your browser.
20 pages ready. The example is an invented university site with the usual problems in it.
The four calls
- Keep
- It earns its place as is.
- Merge
- It belongs inside another page.
- Rewrite
- Right page, wrong words.
- Kill
- Nobody would miss it.
Sorts least-visited first, if your list has traffic numbers in it. That is where the easy kills are.
Bench notes
- The four calls
- Keep, merge, rewrite, kill. Four is deliberate. A binary (keep or kill) makes people defensive and everything survives; a nine-point rubric makes people tired and everything survives. Merge and rewrite are the honest middle: most pages that should not exist as pages are not worthless, they are a paragraph in something better.
- Long tail first
- If your export has traffic numbers in it, the deck can start with the least-visited page and work up. That order matters more than it sounds. Start at the top and you spend your energy defending pages that were never in danger; start at the bottom and the first hundred decisions take a second each, which is what makes finishing possible.
- The number at the end
- How much of the site you cut. On large sites, going page by page, the honest answer usually lands somewhere between forty and sixty percent, and nobody believes it until they have done it themselves. That number is the whole reason the tool exists: it is much easier to argue for deleting half a site with a decision behind every row.
- The manners
- Nothing you paste is uploaded. The deck and your decisions are stored on your device only, so a closed tab does not cost you an afternoon and you can stop and export at any point. Keyboard first, because the whole value is in going fast enough to keep your judgment consistent from the first card to the last.