Structure

Content audits start with what you can count

By Verí

Count pages before you evaluate them

Open your site. Count the pages. Not an estimate—the actual number. If your CMS has a page count, write it down. If it doesn't, you're about to find out how many pages you really have.

This is where most content audits stall. People start with frameworks and evaluation criteria before they know what they're evaluating. You can't assess quality until you know quantity.

Three numbers that tell you where you are

Start with these:

  • Total published pages
  • Pages updated in the last year
  • Pages that have never been updated since publication

These three numbers will tell you if you have a maintenance problem, a production problem, or both. If most of your pages haven't been touched in two years, you don't need a content strategy—you need a deletion plan.

Group by type, not by topic

Your site has structural patterns whether you planned them or not. Product pages, team bios, blog posts, landing pages—these are types. Sort your inventory by type first.

Topics blur. Types don't. A page is either a product description or it isn't. Once you see how many of each type you have, you can decide which types deserve templates and which types need to be retired.

This is structural work that happens before editorial judgment.

Decide what you're measuring and why

Now—only now—pick what else matters:

  • Word count (if length is a problem)
  • Last modified date (if freshness matters)
  • Author (if you have multiple contributors)
  • Traffic (if you have analytics access)

Don't measure things because an audit template told you to. Measure what will help you decide what to keep, fix, or delete. If you're not going to use the data, don't collect it.

Mark what you'll actually do

An audit without decisions is just a list. For each page or page type, mark one of four things:

  • Keep as-is
  • Update (and note what needs updating)
  • Consolidate (and note where it should go)
  • Delete

If you can't decide, mark it "review later" and move on. The goal is forward motion, not perfect categorization on the first pass.

Start with the pages people see

Your homepage and top ten landing pages matter more than your entire archive of 2019 blog posts. Audit those first. Make decisions about those first. If you only fix ten pages, fix the ten that get the most traffic.

This matches the production reality of small sites: you rarely have time to fix everything, so fix what matters most to the people who are actually showing up.

Set a time limit

Content audits expand to fill available time. Give yourself a deadline. Two hours for a fifty-page site. A day for two hundred pages. A week for a thousand.

You're not trying to achieve perfection. You're trying to see what you have so you can decide what to do about it. Speed produces clarity. Overthinking produces paralysis.

Do something with what you found

The audit is done when you start acting on it. Pick the smallest, clearest action and do it this week. Delete five outdated pages. Update three landing pages. Consolidate two redundant sections.

An audit that sits in a spreadsheet is just documentation of a problem you're not solving. Count, decide, act. Then count again in six months.

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