What Should I Remove During a Website Redesign?

1. Thin content (under 300 words, no images, no leads)

Google’s Helpful Content updates have made thin pages a liability, not a neutral. If a page has 150 words, no schema, no images, and nobody finds it useful, it dilutes your site’s topical authority. Cut it, 301 it to the closest stronger page.

2. Expired campaign pages

That landing page from your 2021 holiday promotion. The “Black Friday Special” page from three years ago. The “COVID Update” page. These were valuable then. Now they confuse Google about what your site is about. Remove and redirect.

3. Discontinued service pages

If you stopped offering pool cleaning two years ago but the page still exists, every visitor to it leaves disappointed and every backlink to it points to dead content. Cut it, 301 it to a related service or your services index.

4. Old team bios for departed staff

The lawyer who left in 2019, the photographer who joined another studio, the founder’s first hire from 2015. These pages occasionally rank for the person’s name, which sends traffic to your site for someone who can’t help anyone. Remove and redirect to the team index.

5. Duplicate service variants

“Custom Web Design,” “Web Design Custom,” “Custom Website Development,” “Bespoke Website Design” — when an old SEO consultant convinced the previous owner to spin up four variants of the same service, you have keyword cannibalization. Pick the strongest one, merge content from the others into it, 301 the rest.

6. Orphan URLs

Pages nobody links to internally, pages from previous developers nobody knows exist, test pages that got indexed. Run a Screaming Frog crawl. Any page that’s not linked from anywhere else on your site is an orphan. Most can be cut.

7. Thin tag and category archives

WordPress sites often have hundreds of auto-generated tag and category pages with one or two posts each. These are usually no-indexed by default, but some sites accidentally indexed them. Mass-remove via noindex, or consolidate tags so each archive has 10+ posts.

Every removed page needs a 301 to the most thematically relevant remaining URL. The redirect priority order:

1. The closest topical replacement — old “/seo-services-tampa/” redirects to new “/services/seo-audit/”, not the homepage
2. The parent category page — removed blog post on “WordPress security” redirects to “/blog/category/wordpress/”
3. The services index or main category landing — for orphans with no clear topical match
4. The homepage — only as last resort, and only for genuinely unrelated content

Blanket redirects to the homepage are a sign of lazy migration. Google treats them as soft 404s and stops passing link equity within 90 days.

Step by step:

1. Pull all indexed URLs from Search Console “Pages” report
2. Pull all crawlable URLs from Screaming Frog
3. Cross-reference with GA4 (12 months) and Ahrefs (backlinks)
4. Tag each URL: keep / merge / remove
5. For removals, assign a 301 target
6. Build the redirect map as a CSV
7. Load redirects into the new WordPress site via Redirection plugin or .htaccess
8. Test the redirect map before launch (we run a Screaming Frog crawl against the redirect list to catch errors)

This audit takes a day. It’s the highest-leverage day in a redesign.

The instinct on most redesigns is to keep everything “just in case.” That’s wrong. A leaner site with 60 strong pages beats a bloated site with 250 thin pages — every time, on every metric.

Three principles for your removal pass:

1. Cut deeply once, not gradually over years. A redesign is the one moment when removing 80 pages is operationally cheap. Three months from now, each removal is its own migration project.
2. Document why each page was cut. A simple CSV with the reason (“thin, no traffic, no backlinks”) protects you if the owner asks “why is the press release gone?” six months later.
3. Don’t remove anything until you have a 301 plan for it. Some agencies skip the redirect step on “small” pages. Even a page with 10 monthly visits being 404’d is 120 lost visits a year, plus a small SEO downgrade.

The full keep-cut-merge framework is in which pages should I keep in a redesign. And the traffic preservation work that connects them is in will I lose traffic when I redesign my website.

Every Tampa redesign we ship includes a “removed pages” CSV deliverable — every removed URL, its replacement, the reason. The owner approves it before launch. After launch, we monitor crawl errors for 30 days to confirm Google stopped looking for the removed URLs.

The vendors who skip this step are the ones whose redesigns end up in our inbox six months later asking why traffic dropped 40%. Don’t be their next case study.

If your site has more than 100 pages and you haven’t audited what to remove in 3+ years, a $500 written audit will catch the obvious cuts before you start the rebuild — and the audit cost is refundable against the redesign engagement.