Put your website on a diet. You can cut 50–90%.
By Mona Halland
According to Gerry McGovern the Microsoft.com website has about 10 million pages, and some 3 million of them have never been visited by a single human being except for the ones that made them(!).
Most websites (including yours) probably have way too much redundant, outdated and trivial content. This is content that nobody cares about (except for the ones that made them!). The problem is that this content clogs up your navigation and search system, and gets in the way of users trying to complete important tasks.
Empty calories
So if you want to have a fit website, you should care about your content. To extent the nutritional metaphor, let’s divide your content in two categories: Nutritional content and empty calories.
Nutritional content is useful, well-written content that addresses the very reason the users come to your website.
Empty calories are all the outdated, trivial and redundant content that is based on internal organizational needs instead of user needs.
If you feed your website with nutritional content it will look fresh and healthy.
If you feed you website with content full of empty calories, it will become clumsy, big and difficult to use. Your menus, navigation pages and search results will be full of irrelevant information that users will have to wade through to complete their tasks.
Loosing weight
Luckily it is easier to get rid of empty calories on websites than on your body. All you have to do is delete them!
The main problem is getting your organization to accept that content can actually be deleted, but even this can be done if you use the right arguments.
Here are some candidates for finding empty calories to delete:
- Non-visited pages
- Non-search pages
- Internal banners
- Press releases
- News
- Brochure content written for other media
Staying fit
However, most web teams are focused on producing lots and lots of pages (or empty calories). Very, very few web teams are focused on managing exsisting pages, including deleting bad pages on a regular basis.
Everybody who has worked on losing weight, know that it’s very easy to end up the same place after a diet. You must change your day to day eating habits.
If you just keep on publishing empty calories your website gets sick. So you should get internal checkpoint of your content; is this nutrition or emty calories? If you only publish nutrition and cut the empty calories you will have a fit website for years and years. For most websites its possible to cut 50 – 90% of the content when only nutrition is left.
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