When you have had your website for a long time, you can end up collecting a large selection of pages. Having a ton of pages on your site might make it harder for a visitor to find what they are looking for on your site, and the site might get slowed down a little, which can also cause you to lose visitors. When this happens, it is time to start cleaning up your website. This can feel like a daunting task, and you might not be sure where to start. Here, we will go over some pointers for restructuring your website to clean it up.

Identify Your Goal

Before you begin reworking your site, think about your overall goals for the site and the purpose of having your website. You may have already decided what your site’s goals and purpose were when you first created it, so now is a good time to look back at those goals and determine what is still relevant and what may have changed since the creation of your site or company.

Examine Your Content

Make a spreadsheet to create an overview of your existing content. Your pages should all belong to specific categories or sections of the website, like your product pages, blog, and services pages; these all serve individual purposes that contribute to the site’s structure. If your site does not have much hierarchy to it, you will need to create one when you make your spreadsheet; this will be a great help for getting your website more organized. Additionally, having this hierarchy can help your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

While you work on going through your content, look at your analytics data to see how much traffic each of these pages get, where the traffic comes from, and your conversion rate. This can give you a better idea of what people want to see on your site, so you know what pages should have a more prominent place in your site structure. 

What’s on the menu?

The menu on your site is the gateway for visitors on your website to find whatever they are looking for. Your menu needs to be optimized based on your SEO keywords and analytics data to ensure the most important things are near the top. You can use the current structure of your menu to help you determine the hierarchy of your site structure and include each item on the menu in your content spreadsheet to help you visualize it.

Does everything match up?

Now that you have looked at your website’s goals, examined its content, how the content performs, and the structure of your current menu, it is time to ask yourself a few questions.

• What is the most important content for my goals?
• Is it easy to find in your current menu and/or on your homepage?
• Is the content that is being looked at the most by my audience the content that matches my goals?
• Is there anything in my goals that is missing on my site?
• Do I have irrelevant content in my menu or high up in my hierarchy that is not performing well?
• Are there any pages that are similar that I can combine?

Once you have the answers to these questions, you can get a good idea of how you should reorganize your website. Highlight the most important pages, categories, and sections on your site in your spreadsheet, and note the ones that underperform or are irrelevant to your site’s goals.

There will be some pages that are good but are unnecessary on your menu, so you can remove them from the menu to reduce the clutter but make them visible in another part of your site.

Homepage Changes

After identifying all of this, take a close look at your homepage. Does it meet the goals for your site? Is it relevant for any stage in the journey of your audience?

If you are able to, try to determine where most people are in the user journey when they go to your homepage and what they need to see the most. If you immediately start throwing sales at them, they might get frustrated and go to another page. Try to give them something relevant and straightforward for your company.

Updating and Deleting Content

Now that you have organized everything in your spreadsheet, it is time to start cleaning up your site! If you found content that needs to be deleted, start with that, then delete categories that are no longer relevant. Next, if you have pages or content that needs to be merged or split up, begin working on that.

As you went through your content, you probably flagged things that need to be updated or deleted. Ensure you flag any pages that need to be updated or deleted and include notes of what about it may need updating. For example, you can update a blog post with the top 10 businesses to open in 2018 to fit 2021 easily, allowing you to keep that content while making it relevant to your audience today.

If a page truly does not fit your image anymore, delete it. Make sure that you set up a redirect from that page to one that is closely related to it so you can preserve any traffic that it was getting. If you do not have anything closely related to it, redirect it to a category page that it might be related to; if you cannot find one that fits the bill, just redirect the page to your homepage.

If you have many pages with highly similar content and keywords, which is bound to happen when you have had your website for a long time, merging them is a good idea. Map out the content itself and determine which page is the best, then decide which pieces of content from the other pages need to be added to enhance that article. Once this is done, you can set up a redirect on those pages to the new merged page and delete the others.

Final Thoughts

Reorganizing your website is not a small project to undertake, but it can be necessary once you have had it for a few years to ensure that visitors see the high-quality content you produce. These tips can help you get started on your website reorganization, but Seattle Digital Marketing is here if you need expert help! Contact Seattle Digital Marketing today to get started!