At the first redesign meeting, the discussion was blue versus orange by slide three. We interjected: how about we first look at what pages we actually have?
We exported every URL on the site — 43 of them. Then we pulled six months of Nginx access logs, aggregated by path, and laid it all out in one spreadsheet. The results were a little embarrassing:
- 11 pages had zero visits in six months.
- 6 were event archives from 2016 to 2018, years still in their titles.
- The News Center had 9 posts; 7 of them had single-digit click-through rates.
- The pages with real traffic numbered five: the homepage, product list, contact page, and two detail pages.
Some pages had been added back then just to fill out the navigation, and nobody touched them again.
Deleting pages took more persuasion than adding them. For every one, someone said "what if somebody wants to read it?" Our approach was never to hard-delete: the 11 zero-traffic pages got 301 redirects to the closest matching section, the event archives were merged into a single Past Events list, and the 7 news posts moved into an archive page. No URL returned a 404, no content was lost — the pages just stopped occupying the navigation.
Navigation went from 9 items to 5. The color discussion actually sped up, because there was half as much to lay out.
After launch we watched the logs for two weeks. Those 301'd paths received just over 30 requests, all landing correctly on their new addresses. Not one call asked "where did that old page go?"
We've since made this step a standing rule: subtract first, then talk visuals. The moment the log file exports, it usually says more than any mockup ever will.
