What should you inventory in website content?
A redesign often focuses on new layouts while valuable content sits in the old system. The inventory also gives the team permission to improve or retire weak material deliberately instead of copying everything into a new template.
List public URLs, page titles, descriptions, headings, body content, images, downloads, video, and structured records such as services, products, locations, and articles. Include forms and the confirmation content they produce. Record page owner, current purpose, and any known traffic or business use. A file download linked from an email campaign may matter even if it is not in the navigation.
Use more than the CMS export. Search data, analytics, internal links, and a crawl can reveal pages that are still visited but easy to overlook. Google’s site move guidance recommends using sitemaps, analytics, server logs, and link data to identify important URLs when planning a move.
Which pages should stay, change, or leave?
Give each item a decision: keep, improve, consolidate, redirect, archive, or remove. Add a reason. A strong service page may need new copy but should keep its role. Three overlapping FAQ pages may work better as one answer. An obsolete event page may no longer serve a visitor, but old links to it still need an intentional destination or appropriate response.
Separate content quality from URL value. A thin page with useful inbound links may deserve a careful rewrite rather than deletion. A polished page that describes a discontinued offer should not survive because it looks good. The decision should reflect the reader’s current need and the business’s current scope.
What happens to media and relationships?
Map images, PDFs, video, and embedded assets to their new locations. Check rights and captions before reuse. If an old article references a downloadable guide, preserve a working path or update the article. If a service relates to an industry or case example, record that relationship in the new content model rather than copying the same text into several pages.
Test a small sample import with difficult content: long titles, galleries, tables, missing images, and special characters. A successful export file does not prove the new site displays the content correctly. Editors should also test whether they can update the migrated record without breaking its layout.
Who approves the migration?
Assign a content owner for each family and a reviewer for factual, legal, or proof-dependent material. Set a cutover rule so staff know when to stop editing the old site and where new changes belong. Record what remains unpublished because it lacks approval. A migration should not quietly promote old claims into a new design.
The final inventory becomes the basis for route mapping and post-launch checks. Without it, the team can only guess whether a missing page was intentionally removed.
Classify ten high-value pages first.
Export a list of current URLs and choose ten high-value pages to classify first. For a site with editable structures, see web development. Talk to a Specialist to build a migration scope that preserves useful content and makes omissions visible.
