September 15, 2026
When auditing your website content, one of the hardest things to decide is whether to keep, toss, or refresh a piece of content. However, pruning your website content is important for user experience, rankings, and credibility, so it’s not a job you can put off forever.
If you’re thinking of taking a deep dive into your current content but feel lost as to what to do with it all, here are a few examples of content we would choose to kill, keep, or improve, so your site remains neat and tidy.
Some pages are just no longer worthy of your time and attention, and keeping them on your site is just creating clutter.
We should add a caveat here though, that before deleting any content, check whether the page has a decent backlink profile, organic traffic, conversions, or anything else of value. If it’s bringing nothing to the table, then get the shears out.
If a page has no reason to exist, then it probably shouldn’t.
There are many reasons why you might have a piece of content on your site that no longer has a purpose. Whether it be an article created to target a particular keyword, a landing page that supported an old campaign, or a discontinued product page, if that purpose is no longer relevant to your business or your audience, then it might be time to chuck it.
If there’s a relevant, useful alternative somewhere else on your site, you could redirect it, but otherwise deleting is probably your best bet.
In the good old days, you could create content with the sole purpose of targeting keywords and ranking in the search results. Sadly, those days are long gone.
Keeping articles stuffed with keywords or thin, poorly written content that was clearly created to manipulate search engines will do more harm than good. John Mueller recently stated in a conversation on Bluesky that old pages can still affect Google’s judgement about your site’s value, even when that content has been updated. So, to avoid any spam penalties, it’s probably best to remove this type of content.
There are some pieces of content that pretty much never go out of style, and even if you wrote them years ago, they are still accurate, relevant, and useful to both your business and your target audience. We’re mostly talking about evergreen topics, educational resources, and definitions here, as well as anything that can be genuinely useful long after it's been published.
In some cases, editing these pieces can be damaging. You might wind up removing useful information or altering something that’s working perfectly well, lowering the quality of the content.
Some pieces of content just do well, and there’s nothing wrong with leaving them be. Especially if there’s nothing of value to add.
Analytics can tell you a lot about whether or not a piece of content is worthy of a place on your website. Just be sure to look beyond traffic and page views. Pages that are consistently earning you backlinks, generating enquiries, converting customers, or keeping users engaged are valuable even if traffic is on the smaller side.
This is the category of content that has the most potential. You will be surprised at how much content on your website is good and just needs something a little extra to make it more relevant, useful, and competitive so it performs better.
However, it is important to note that improving content doesn’t mean making minor tweaks. From an SEO perspective, this is effectively useless. To really see a difference, you need to be adding at least 500 words of entirely new, relevant content that genuinely adds more value to the page. Updating content can reduce decay by up to 87%, so this is definitely worth your time.
There are some pages that still see results and genuinely meet the needs of your audience, but contain out of date facts and examples, broken links, or irrelevant screenshots. Instead of deleting these pages, it might be better to refresh them.
Remove anything that’s no longer relevant, update statistics with something more recent, and replace any broken links. You may also need to alter the angle of your content if the search intent has drifted from when you first hit 'publish'.
Any piece of content that gets you traffic but has a high bounce rate or low conversion rate is a prime candidate for the 'improvement' category.
Some articles will attract thousands of visitors every month, but the results end there. No one is getting in touch, subscribing, or making a purchase.
There are a few reasons why this could be the case:
You could have a really good piece of content, but if it doesn’t match the user’s search intent or there’s no obvious CTA or logical next step, you could be losing out on leads. On the flip side, if you’re being too salesy and bombarding people with CTAs, you might put them off.
Ask yourself if the content matches what the reader is actually looking for and if it gives them a reason to click onto another page, fill in a form, get in touch, or make a purchase. If it doesn’t, you may need to make some tweaks.
The general rule of thumb is every 6 to 12 months. However, audit frequency can depend on how often you post, the industry you’re in and how quickly things move in it, and how fast the information you share becomes outdated. You may also choose to conduct an audit if you’re in the midst of a rebrand or major website build to ensure you have a fresh start.
Content audits can be incredibly beneficial for your site, so it’s important that you schedule these every once in a while.
If you asked us, we would…
Kill:
Keep:
Improve:
If you’re still unsure what to do with a piece of content, we can help. For a comprehensive content audit, get in touch with us today.
