Philosophy
For website re-designs, it is essential to obtain a clear picture of the content that will be migrated, modified, or discarded. Similar to taking inventory before moving to a new house, a Content Audit is a survey that informs the quantitative and qualitative state of existing content prior to moving to a new framework. Many times, sites have grown over time and the exact size and state of the content have not been properly evaluated.
There are two aspects of a Content Audit:
- Quantitative – how many pages, how many sections, what different file types?
- Qualitative – how current is the content? Does it need to be modified? Discarded?
Depending on what the Audit reveals, the results may have an impact on overall project scope and effort required to migrate to a new website. Having an accurate picture of the size of the content picture is essential to properly planning and crafting the new site.
How it works
The first step in a Content Audit typically involves an automated “crawl” of the current site. An indexing tool follows all links on the site automatically and generates a report that indicates the number of pages in the site, any broken links, dates the content was last updated, and other useful statistics. This provides a good indicator of the scope or effort that will be required.
Once this quantitative picture is established, the “Qualitative” evaluation can begin, whose purpose it is to determine what should be done with each piece of existing content. Depending on the size of the site, this phase may involve one or more team members, each tasked with making judgement evaluations for each content item. Typically this involves one of the following criteria:
- Keep as is – migrate to the new site with no modifications
- Modify – update or re-write as needed to align with new site goals
- Discard – do not include the content in the new site
Since modifying or creating new content involves considerable effort, a successful Content Audit can help project teams plan and scope projects accordingly, and pave the way for a successful transition to a new site, in addition to preserving content that was shown to be valuable to users. While some decisions regarding content are ultimately based on editorial judgement, analytics tools, site usage reports, or search analysis can provide useful insights into what content is valuable to users.
Examples where we have successfully used a Content Audit:
- Performed a Content Audit for Partners Healthcare (10,000 pages). The site “crawler” report allowed us to submit each content section owner only those pages they were responsible for and greatly streamlined the decision making process for managing the content migration