Spring Cleaning the Pages Nobody Visits

The pages nobody opens

A small business site gathers pages over the years: a service added in 2014, a promotion for a long-gone Christmas, a page for each town in the area, a landing page for an ad campaign that ended.

Each made sense when it was added. Few were ever removed, so the site carries all of them, in its menus, its sitemap and the search results.

Last year's figures show which ones still earn their place. On many sites, a long list of pages had a handful of visits over twelve months, and some had none at all.

Finding them in last year's numbers

In Universal Analytics, the all pages report under site content lists every page that was viewed, with a count for each. Set the date range to the whole of 2018 and sort from the fewest views upward.

There is a catch. A page nobody visited does not appear in that report at all, because analytics only records what happened.

So compare the report with a full list of pages, from the sitemap or the website's own page list. Anything on the full list that is missing from the report had no visits in a year.

Search Console's performance report adds another view: which pages appear in search results, how often, and how rarely some of them are clicked.

What turns up

• Services you stopped offering, still described in the present tense.
• Old promotions, with dates that passed long ago.
• Near-identical pages, one per town or per minor variation.
• Campaign landing pages for ads that ended years ago.
• Test pages and drafts, published by accident.
• Pages nothing links to, reachable only from search.

The third does the most quiet damage. Twenty town pages with the same text compete with each other in search, and a visitor who lands on one finds less than the main services page offers.

Low visits are not the whole verdict

A page with few visits is not automatically useless, so look before cutting.

Seasonal pages earn their keep in a few weeks a year, which is why a full year of figures matters. Legal pages, such as the privacy policy, exist because they must, not because people read them.

Some pages serve a few visitors who matter a great deal: the commercial services page one property manager reads before sending a large contract, or the careers page that matters only when you are hiring.

Low visits mark a page for a decision. They do not make the decision.

Update, merge or remove

Each page on the list gets one of three verdicts.

Update it if the subject still matters to customers and the page could answer their question properly. A service you still offer, described thinly, usually deserves a rewrite rather than a deletion.

Merge it if another page covers the same ground. Two thin pages about the same service make one good one, and the weaker address redirects to the stronger.

Remove it if what it describes is no longer true and nothing replaces it: a discontinued service, an expired offer, a test page.

A worked example

A party and event rental company had a site of about seventy pages, built up over eight years by several different people.

Last year's figures, set against the full page list, showed a long tail with almost no visits: a page for bouncy castles the company stopped renting in 2016, three old Christmas party promotions, and twenty-two town pages sharing one paragraph.

The bouncy castle page was removed and redirected to the page for children's party rentals. The Christmas promotions were deleted and redirected to a single seasonal page, to be updated each autumn.

The town pages became a single service area page listing every town, with a short note on delivery charges by distance. Each old town address now redirects to it.

The site ended up with about forty pages, each with a reason to exist, and a saved list of redirects in case anything needs checking later.

Redirecting what you remove

A removed page leaves an address behind, and that address may be in search results, bookmarks, old emails and links from other sites.

Redirect each one permanently, with what is called a 301, to the closest page that still exists. Closest means the page a visitor following the old link would have wanted, not the home page.

Sending everything to the home page looks tidy and helps nobody. Visitors arrive somewhere that does not answer their question, and Google tends to treat that kind of redirect as a page that no longer exists.

Whoever maintains the site should keep the old and new addresses in a spreadsheet: the record of what was done, and the first thing to check if a page goes missing from search.

Checking what links to a page first

Before removing anything, find out what points to it.

Search Console's links report shows which pages other sites link to, and a page with links from local directories or suppliers deserves a careful redirect.

Check your own site too. Menus, footers and old posts may still link to the page, and those links should change to the new address rather than rely on the redirect.

And ask whether any ad, newsletter or printed piece sends people there. A page with no visits from search may still be the landing page for something else.

Keeping it from piling up again

Most clutter arrives with a good reason and no end date.

When a page is added for a promotion or a campaign, put its end date in the calendar at the same time, along with what should happen to the page afterwards.

Then repeat the check each spring, using the year just finished. The first clean-out takes an afternoon; later ones take far less, because the list is short.

The counter-case

Not every site needs a clean-out.

A site of ten pages, all current, has nothing to remove, and its time is better spent improving the pages it has.

A thin page that answers a real question is worth rewriting rather than deleting, and a seasonal page should never be judged on a quiet month.

Update what customers still need, merge what overlaps, remove what is no longer true, and redirect every address you remove.

The order to do it in

1. List every page on the site.
2. Pull last year's views for each page.
3. Mark pages with few or none for a decision.
4. Check seasonal, legal and campaign pages separately.
5. Decide update, merge or remove for each.
6. Redirect every removed address to its closest match.
7. Fix internal links to point at the new pages.

Step six is the one that protects the work. Removing a page takes a minute, but an address left without a redirect turns every old link to it into an error page.

The figures this depends on are covered in writing down last year's numbers first.

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.