Judge every page against what you sell now rather than against its traffic. Pages describing work you no longer want, or missing work you now do, matter more than pages nobody visits.

A different question from finding dead pages

An audit for unvisited pages asks which parts of the site nobody reads.

The annual review asks something else: whether the site as a whole still describes the business you now run.

Those produce different lists. A page with healthy traffic about a service you have stopped offering is a bigger problem than a page nobody has opened, because it actively misleads people and generates enquiries you decline.

Businesses change more in a year than their sites do, and the gap accumulates quietly.

The four categories

The fourth is the one an audit for dead pages will never find, and it is frequently the most valuable finding of the exercise.

Start from the business, not the site

The order that makes this work.

Write down what you actually sold this year, from invoices rather than memory, in order of value.

Then check whether each has a page, and whether that page is any good.

Doing it the other way round, page by page, produces a tidying exercise rather than a strategic one, and it misses everything that is absent.

Most businesses find at least one service producing real revenue with no page, and at least one page devoted to something they barely do.

That mismatch is the whole point of the review.

Traffic without enquiries

The category that causes the most argument internally.

A page attracting a large number of visitors who never contact you is not automatically earning its place, and it frequently attracts defenders because the number is large.

The questions are whether those visitors could ever buy, and whether the page does anything except exist.

Sometimes the answer is that the audience is wrong, in which case the traffic is a vanity number.

Sometimes the page is right and simply never asks, in which case adding a clear next step converts it from a visitor magnet into a working page.

Check the second before concluding the first, since the fix is an afternoon and the alternative is discarding something useful.

A worked example

A firm listed what they had sold, by value, from twelve months of invoices.

Their largest revenue line, accounting for roughly a third of the year, had no page. It had grown from a sideline and nobody had noticed it becoming the main thing.

Two pages described services they had effectively stopped offering, and both were still generating occasional enquiries they had to decline.

Their best-performing page by traffic was a guide that had produced no enquiries in two years and had no contact route on it at all.

They wrote one page, removed two, and added a clear next step to the guide.

The new page became their second-highest source of enquiries within six months, and the guide started producing enquiries for the first time.

Merge rather than multiply

The structural half of the review.

Sites accumulate pages that overlap: two about the same service written eighteen months apart, an old page and a newer one, a general page and a specific one competing for the same search.

Merging those into one stronger page is almost always better than keeping both, because two weak pages on a subject perform worse than one good one.

Take the best of each, publish at the address with the most history, and redirect the other.

That is a genuine improvement rather than housekeeping, and it is the most reliable content work available to a small site.

Ask whether the structure still fits

The question worth asking once a year and not more often.

If the business has changed shape, the navigation frequently has not: services grouped the way they were grouped three years ago, with the growing part buried and the declining part prominent.

Look at your main menu and ask whether a stranger would understand what you mostly do from it.

Reordering a menu costs almost nothing and is one of the few changes that affects every page at once.

Where the shape has changed substantially, that is a rebuild conversation rather than a review one, and it is worth recognising which you have.

Keep some pages that fail the test

Worth stating so the review does not become destructive.

Pages that exist for legal or policy reasons stay regardless of traffic.

Pages that answer a question customers ask on the phone earn their place even with few visitors, because they save time rather than generate it.

Pages that support a sale without being the last click, such as an about page or a page showing your work, are read by people who then contact you from elsewhere.

And a page that a small number of high-value customers use is worth more than one with ten times the traffic.

Judge by role rather than by number, and be able to state each page's job in a sentence.

The counter-case

Annual reviews can be an excuse for churn.

A page rewritten every year never accumulates the history that makes it perform, and a site that is continually restructured loses more to broken addresses than it gains from tidiness.

There is also a risk in judging too early. A page published in September has not had time to do anything by December, and removing it because it has no traffic is discarding something before it started.

The useful review is mostly additive: write the missing page, merge the duplicates, fix the out-of-date details, and leave the rest alone.

Deletion should be a small part of the outcome rather than the point of the exercise.

The review

  1. List what you sold, by value, from invoices.
  2. Check each has a page, and whether it is good.
  3. Write the missing ones.
  4. Remove work you no longer want.
  5. Merge pages that compete with each other.
  6. Add a next step to pages with traffic and no enquiries.
  7. Reorder the menu to match the business.

Step one is what makes this a business review rather than a tidying exercise, and it takes twenty minutes with a year of invoices.

Finding pages nobody reads is covered in pages nobody has opened in a year.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from finding dead pages?

It asks whether the site still describes the business you now run. A well-visited page about a service you have stopped offering is a bigger problem than one nobody reads.

Where should the review start?

With what you actually sold this year, from invoices rather than memory, in order of value. Then check whether each has a page. Working page by page misses everything absent.

What is the most common finding?

A service producing real revenue with no page at all, usually something that grew from a sideline while nobody noticed it becoming the main thing.

What about pages with traffic and no enquiries?

Check whether the page ever asks before concluding the audience is wrong. Adding a clear next step is an afternoon and often converts a visitor magnet into a working page.

Should I delete overlapping pages?

Merge them. Two weak pages on a subject perform worse than one good one. Take the best of each, publish at the address with the most history, and redirect the other.

Which failing pages should stay?

Legal and policy pages, pages answering questions customers phone about, pages supporting a sale without being the last click, and anything used by high-value customers.

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.

Reviewing the site this month?

List what you sold by value first. The missing page is usually worth more than everything you would have deleted.

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