Content Inventory Before a Website Redesign
A redesign that starts in Figma without a content inventory inherits forgotten pages and conflicting offers. How GOV.UK’s large-scale audits and the Province of British Columbia’s inventory guidance help service sites decide what to keep, merge, or retire before visual work begins.
Many redesign briefs open with moodboards, component libraries, and a new homepage concept. The quieter problem sits underneath: the current site already holds years of service pages, PDFs, blog posts, and landing experiments—some accurate, some duplicated, some quietly wrong. Without a structured list of what exists, a new design can polish outdated claims, orphan useful pages, or migrate every URL “just in case,” which preserves confusion under a fresher skin.
A content inventory is that list. A content audit is the judgment pass that follows. The Province of British Columbia’s content design guidance treats both as prerequisites for healthy content life cycles and explicitly places audits at the beginning of a site redesign. GOV.UK’s published audit work shows what the discipline looks like at scale—and which questions save the most effort when answered first.
What breaks when redesign skips the inventory
BC’s guidance frames the risk in operational terms: inventories and audits help you see what you have and how good it is, and they reduce the chance that wrong information keeps circulating—especially when search engines (and now AI tools) surface pages you forgot were live. For a service firm, that can mean an old pricing PDF ranking beside a new offer, two “About” narratives that disagree, or a retired service still linked from the footer.
GOV.UK’s Inside GOV.UK post on a large-scale transport content audit (Mark Green and Steph Wilson, 23 February 2018) describes the same tension from the findability side: search and navigation are not the only reasons people struggle—page content itself can make things hard to find when titles, summaries, and formats are weak. Their team started from an inventory of 7,396 transport content items before splitting work into themes. The lesson for a smaller service site is not the absolute number; it is the sequence: count and classify first, then improve.
An earlier GOV.UK Finding Things audit (Alan Maddrell, 19 February 2016) measured what editing decisions look like in practice. Editors reviewed 723 early-years content items: 33 (4.6%) were marked for update to become clearer, more findable, or more useful, and 79 (10.9%) were marked for retirement—withdrawn or redirected. Among 445 guidance-format items, retirement rose to 17.8%. Redesigns that migrate “everything” without that pass often spend design and development budget on pages that should have left quietly.
Inventory versus audit: two jobs, one spreadsheet
BC separates the work cleanly:
- Content inventory — a list of pages and related online assets your team manages or contributes to, typically one row per item in a spreadsheet or document that stays updated.
- Content audit — the review of each inventoried item for accuracy, duplication, and relevance, ending in decisions to update, replace, archive, merge, or keep as-is—and often revealing gaps where new content is needed.
Suggested inventory fields from BC’s guide map well to service sites: page titles, current URLs, file names and types (PDF, spreadsheets), page types and hierarchy, parent/child relationships, related content elsewhere on the domain, dependencies (forms, campaigns), content type, authors or publishers, primary audience, metadata, status, and key dates (publish, review, update, removal). Include a review cadence column so the sheet survives past launch day.
GOV.UK’s transport audit iterated a short question list that service teams can adapt without government jargon:
- Does this page need to be removed (duplicate or unnecessary)?
- Does the title need to change?
- Does the summary need to change?
- Does the page body need to change?
- Do attachments need work?
- Is the content type or format wrong for the job?
- Is the content still current?
Green and Wilson later noted they would put removal first: answering “retire?” early avoids polishing pages that should not ship into the new architecture. That ordering is the practical hinge between inventory and redesign scope.
| Decision | Typical signal | Redesign implication |
|---|---|---|
| Keep | Accurate, used, clear owner | Migrate; preserve URL or plan redirect |
| Update | Right topic, weak title/body | Rewrite before or during build |
| Merge | Overlapping service blurbs | One stronger page; redirect the rest |
| Move | Right content, wrong IA | New path; update internal links |
| Archive / delete | Unused, outdated, or conflicting | Remove from nav; redirect where needed |
How to run the pass on a small service site
GOV.UK’s large-scale lessons compress cleanly for firms with dozens—not thousands—of URLs.
Split into manageable chunks. Transport themes that stayed too large became unwieldy; agencies tripped over shared spreadsheets and duplicated rows. The fix they recommend: dedicated ownership per area, slices by user need or popularity, and improve in waves so newly published pages are not forever out of scope. A consultancy might chunk by Services, Resources, and Company—or by top tasks from analytics.
Dedicate real time. Gavin Dispain at the Department for Transport, quoted in the 2018 post, called auditing time- and resource-intensive and advised planning for someone to work on it exclusively. On a service redesign, that person might be the owner or a studio partner—but the role should be named, not “whoever has a free Friday.”
Look beyond your team’s silo. BC warns that topics often span branches; overlapping content may already exist elsewhere on the same domain. For a multi-location firm or a site that grew by acquisition, inventory sibling brands and old microsites before you redraw the primary nav.
Use analytics as evidence, not as the only vote. BC points teams to web analytics to judge high-impact content (usually higher traffic and higher audience value) and to audit those items more often. Low-traffic legal pages can still be high stakes; retirement decisions still need an owner’s sign-off.
Record rationale. BC asks teams to capture why a change was made in a history tab so later editors understand the decision. GOV.UK kept a shared record of tricky audit questions and advice so agencies answered consistently. Both habits prevent redesign arguments from restarting every sprint.
A short analogy: an inventory is a warehouse packing list before a move; the audit is deciding which boxes ship, which get combined, and which go to disposal—so the new house is not filled with sealed cartons you never open.
Limits and tradeoffs worth stating
An inventory is not a content strategy by itself. BC and GOV.UK both treat it as input to information architecture, taxonomy, and improvement work—not a substitute for knowing who the site serves. Audits also age quickly: as soon as you act on the sheet, new pages appear. Plan maintenance, not a one-time heroic cleanup.
Government programs audited thousands of items with dedicated content designers. A ten-page service site does not need the same tooling, but it does need the same honesty about duplicates and retirement. Automated crawls can draft the URL list; people still have to judge quality. Skipping the human pass recreates the original problem with better CSS.
Practical takeaways for your next website
- Inventory before wireframes. List URLs, assets, owners, and dates so scope debates use evidence.
- Ask “retire?” first. Do not rewrite titles for pages that should redirect or disappear.
- Chunk by user need or section. Finish and improve one slice before opening the next.
- Decide keep / update / merge / move / archive for each row. Attach an owner and a redirect plan where URLs change.
- Keep the sheet alive after launch. Schedule reviews for high-impact pages so the next redesign starts ahead of the chaos.
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