Old website, new look: what content to keep and what to leave behind

A website redesign usually starts with design and ends with a surprise: the new site looks good, but a few weeks later fewer visitors are arriving from search. The cause is rarely the design. The cause is that the old addresses and part of the old content disappeared along with the old look. A website that has been running for five to ten years almost always contains a few subpages that quietly bring in enquiries without anyone noticing.

Before you touch the old site

The first job is not writing new copy, it is counting. Every public address on your site is a separate asset. Other companies' sites may link to it, along with old advertising links, social media posts, bookmarks and search results. If you do not know how many addresses the site has in the first place, you cannot know how many of them broke during the move.

• The sitemap.xml file gives a quick overview of the pages your system itself treats as public.
• Google Search Console shows which addresses are indexed and which ones bring in enquiries.
• Server logs also reveal the pages that never made it into the sitemap.
• A crawler walks through the site the way a search engine does and produces a full list.
• Analytics shows how many visits each page brought in over the past year.

Once that list is in a spreadsheet, you can put two numbers next to every row: visits over the past year and the number of search enquiries. Those numbers should guide the rest of the decision. Without the spreadsheet the choice is then based mostly on guesswork, and gut feeling tends to favour the pages the owner looks at most often rather than the ones visitors actually find.

What is worth taking with you

Old content splits fairly clearly into two groups. Some pages are genuine company assets: they answer the questions people type into search. The rest is history that no longer works for anyone.

Content that usually moves across

• Service and product pages, along with pricing information.
• The contact page and location pages for different service areas.
• Frequently asked questions that match the questions people really ask on the phone.
• Blog posts that have been linked to from elsewhere or that bring in enquiries consistently.
• Case studies and examples of completed work.

Content that can safely be left behind

• Expired campaign pages and invitations to events that have already happened.
• Texts written twice that differ only in the heading.
• Empty tag pages and category pages with no entries in them.
• Test pages and technical addresses left over from the old system.

A common misconception is that old content is out of date anyway and the sensible thing is to start from scratch. In reality, one old subpage is often the only reason the company shows up in search at all. The opposite mistake is just as common: every subpage gets carried over because more feels better. Outdated and duplicate content adds nothing, but it does dilute the clarity of the new site.

The redirect map

When an address changes and the old one returns a 404 error, two things happen at once. The visitor hits a dead end and the link value the page has built up is left hanging. A 301 redirect tells the search engine that the content has moved permanently to a new address and carries most of that value across. Google's own documentation explains the types of redirect and their effects in fairly plain terms.

A map means a spreadsheet with the old address on the left and the new one on the right. Every row needs a specific destination matching the closest equivalent content. If every old address is pointed at the home page, this is treated as a soft error and the benefit is lost. The visitor is annoyed too, because they clicked a link promising one particular service and landed on a general welcome page.

Redirects should be set up before the new site goes live, not after the first complaint. If an old address returns an error for a month, visitors have already gone elsewhere and the search engine has dropped those pages from the index. Getting them back takes many times longer than filling in the spreadsheet properly beforehand. After launch, work through the spreadsheet row by row and check that every redirect genuinely works.

Text and images in their new setting

Moving content across is not a matter of copying from one window into another. Over the years, old texts pick up references to old addresses, phone numbers and prices that are no longer in use. Every page being carried over needs a quick read: does the fact still hold, does the link go anywhere, and does the heading say the same thing as the content.

Images are a separate matter. Old sites often still hold the original files, several megabytes each. On the new site they should be transferred at a sensible size and in a modern format, because large files are the most common reason a shiny new site loads slowly. Visitors do not time the load with a stopwatch, but they can tell when a page is slow. Then they leave. Speed can be checked with Google's speed test.

Meta descriptions and titles deserve the same attention, because they are often carried over automatically and end up describing a page that no longer exists. Internal links need checking too: a reference to an old address inside old copy will work through the redirect, but it is better to point straight to the right place. If you would rather someone else did this work for you, the SEO service at 379 € per month plus VAT is one option, and a new website at 790 € plus VAT is another.

The first few weeks after launch

Search results fluctuate for a while after a move. This is normal and it does not mean something has broken. The important thing is telling fluctuation apart from a real fault. Fluctuation means a keyword moving a couple of places up and down. A real fault means a whole group of subpages dropping out of the index or starting to return errors. A handful of checks is enough:

• The indexing report and error list in Search Console.
• Visits compared with the previous month and with the same period last year.
• The number of form submissions and bookings, because technical faults tend to hide there.
• Page speed on mobile, worth measuring again a week after launch.

Keep a backup of the old site even after the new one is live. A missing paragraph or an old price list often only comes to light months later. Someone asks a question whose answer used to sit on one old subpage. Keeping a backup is cheap insurance. Wait at least a month before making further changes, because before that you cannot yet see how the new site is really performing. Examples of finished sites can be found under completed work.

If your old website needs a new look and you want to know in advance which content is worth keeping, take a look at the prices or write to us: contact and free audit. During the audit we go through the addresses on the old site and tell you honestly what moves across and what does not.