The Page You Should Delete

Why deleting improves a site

Counterintuitive, since adding is how sites are usually improved.

A page nobody visits still appears in navigation, still competes with your better pages for the same searches, and still needs to be true.

Which means it costs attention from visitors, dilutes what the site is about, and creates a risk that somebody reads something out of date.

Removing it makes the remaining pages easier to find and removes the maintenance obligation entirely.

What to look for

• Services you no longer offer.
• Events, offers and promotions that have passed.
• Pages nobody has visited in a year.
• Thin pages duplicating a better one.
• Area pages with the same text and a different town.
• Anything factually out of date that you will not update.

The first is the most damaging, since a page for a service you stopped offering produces enquiries you have to decline, which wastes everybody's time.

Finding them

Analytics will list every page with its visits for the year.

Sort by visits, ascending, and look at the bottom.

Anything with almost none is a candidate, and the reason matters: a page nobody visits because nobody links to it is different from one nobody visits because nobody wants it.

Then read them. A page can be well visited and still be wrong, and a page with no visits can be one somebody genuinely needs occasionally.

The list is a prompt for judgement rather than an instruction.

A worked example

A business with thirty-one pages, of which eleven had received fewer than ten visits all year.

Reading through them: four were area pages with identical text, three were services no longer offered, two were old promotions, one was a duplicate of the contact page, and one was a genuinely useful reference page that simply had no links to it.

They deleted ten and linked properly to the eleventh.

The site went from thirty-one pages to twenty-one, and the remaining service pages started performing better in search, which is the usual result.

The most valuable outcome was the three withdrawn services, which had been producing several enquiries a year that had to be turned down.

Redirecting rather than removing

The technical part, and it matters.

A deleted page leaves an address that returns nothing, which produces an error for anybody with a link or a bookmark.

A redirect sends that address to a sensible replacement instead: the relevant service page, or the services overview.

Which preserves any accumulated value in the old address and means nobody meets a dead end.

What not to do is redirect everything to the homepage, which is unhelpful and treated as a failure by search engines anyway.

Where there is no sensible replacement, letting it return a proper not-found response is correct and honest.

Area pages specifically

Worth addressing since they are the most common thing on this list.

A set of pages naming each town you serve, with the same text and the town swapped, was once an effective technique and is now recognised for what it is.

They rarely rank, they read badly to anybody who arrives, and they make the site look mechanical.

The alternative that works: one page naming every area you cover plainly, and genuinely local content where you have it, such as jobs completed in named places.

Which is fewer pages doing more, and it is the general pattern this whole subject follows.

Blog posts nobody reads

A specific category with a different answer from the rest.

Old posts announcing things, wishing people a happy new year, or covering something long since superseded.

Those are dated by nature, and a reader understands that a post from 2016 describes 2016, which is different from a service page being wrong.

Which means the case for deleting is weaker: they do little harm and occasionally still bring somebody in.

What is worth removing: anything factually wrong that somebody might act on, and anything that reflects badly on the business now.

And where a series of thin posts covers the same ground, combining them into one good page is better than deleting or leaving them.

The counter-case

Where a low-traffic page should stay.

Anything legally required: privacy, terms, accessibility statements, licence details.

A page answering a rare but important question, which by definition gets few visits and matters to the people who need it.

Anything ranking for something specific, however little traffic it produces, since low traffic and useful traffic are different measures.

And a page linked from something external, such as a directory or a supplier, where removing it breaks somebody else's link.

Checking before you delete

Two things worth verifying, since deleting is difficult to undo well.

Whether anything external links to the page: a directory, a supplier, a local association, or an old advertisement.

Search Console will show which pages receive external links, and a page with several is worth redirecting carefully rather than removing.

And whether the page appears in search results for anything, which a site search or the performance report will show.

A page with no visits can still be ranking for something nobody has noticed, and that position transfers with a redirect and disappears without one.

Updating instead of deleting

Frequently the better answer, and worth considering first.

A page that is thin because nobody finished it is a page waiting to be finished, not a page to remove.

A service page with no prices and no examples will perform poorly and may be your second most valuable service.

Which means the question is whether the page should exist rather than whether it currently works.

Delete what should not exist, improve what should, and the distinction is about the business rather than the traffic figures.

Doing it once a year

The right frequency, and December is the obvious moment.

Pages accumulate quietly: a promotion, a temporary notice, a service tried for a season.

An annual pass keeps the total manageable and prevents a site reaching the state where the audit is a project rather than an afternoon.

It also catches anything that became wrong during the year, which is the more common problem than anything becoming unvisited.

The audit

1. List every page with its annual visits.
2. Read the bottom twenty.
3. Mark each: delete, improve, or leave.
4. Delete withdrawn services first.
5. Redirect every deleted address somewhere sensible.
6. Check nothing external linked to what you removed.

The fourth is where the immediate return is, since pages for withdrawn services are actively costing time in enquiries that have to be declined.

What the remaining pages should contain is covered in making one template work for nine services.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.