A content inventory is a spreadsheet that lists every page of your current site before anyone designs the new one. It tells you what you have, what works, what is out of date and what must be redirected. Skip it and a redesign tends to lose pages that were quietly bringing in calls.
It sounds like paperwork. It is closer to counting the boxes before a move. The work is mostly looking, and you can do the first pass yourself in an afternoon on a small site.
What goes in a content inventory for a redesign?
It is one row per page, with a few columns that let you decide what happens next. Start with the URL, the page title and the page type: service, location, blog post, contact, legal, or something else. Add an owner, meaning the person who can say whether the text is still true.
Then add the columns that drive decisions. Last meaningful update. Whether the page gets visits, taken from your analytics for the last year. Whether it ranks for anything, from Search Console. Whether other pages link to it. Finally, a verdict column with four possible values: keep, rewrite, merge, remove.
You can build the URL list from your sitemap file, from a crawl, or by hand on a small site. Check all three if you can. Pages that appear in a crawl but not in the sitemap are often old landing pages somebody forgot.
How do you decide what to keep, merge or remove?
Look at each page and ask whether a real visitor would miss it. A service page that gets steady visits and leads is a keeper, even if the writing is dull; you can improve the text without changing the address. Two pages that answer the same question compete with each other and usually should become one stronger page.
Removal needs care. A page with no visits and no links, about an event from years ago, can go. A page with no visits that still has a few links from other sites is different: retire it, but redirect it to the closest live page so those links keep working. If you cannot say what the closest page is, that is a sign the new site is missing something.
Do not judge pages by how they look. Old pages often look worse than they perform. The website audit covers the technical side, such as speed and mobile behavior; the inventory is the content half of the same picture.
Why do redirects belong in the inventory?
Because every address that changes is a promise to keep. When the new site launches with different URLs and no redirects, visitors from search results and bookmarks land on a “page not found” message, and search engines have to relearn the whole site from scratch.
Add two columns to the sheet: new URL and redirect needed. Fill them in during planning, not on launch night. At launch, test a sample of the old URLs by hand, especially your top ten by visits and any page that appears in an email signature or printed material. People forget those.
If the structure stays similar, most URLs can stay exactly as they are. Changing an address should have a reason better than “the new theme prefers it.”
Who should own the inventory during the project?
Someone on your side, even if the studio builds the first draft. The studio can see traffic and links, but only you know that the page about the old warehouse location is wrong, or that the “About” text mentions a partner who left. Give each owner a short deadline to confirm their rows.
It also feeds the copy plan. Pages marked “rewrite” become writing tasks with names, and pages marked “merge” tell the designer how many templates are really needed. That saves design hours, which is why the sheet is worth having early in a rebuild.
A quick way to start
- Export your sitemap URLs into a spreadsheet.
- Add the last year of visits per page from your analytics.
- Mark each row keep, rewrite, merge or remove.
- Write the new address for every page that moves.
- Have each owner confirm their rows before design begins.