How to Maintain and Adjust Website Structure: From Menus and Categories to Cleaning Up Old Content

Maintaining an existing website’s structure should start with reviewing menus and categories, then addressing outdated content or content that competes with other pages on the site. When making changes, also consider where old URLs should lead and how visitors can reach pages you retain. The goal is not to rebuild the entire website at once, but to review it regularly as content is added and business goals change. The following draws on maintenance advice published by Yoast in 2023 to offer ideas for making adjustments. It does not represent current mandatory Google requirements or guarantee improved rankings.

Map out the menu first to identify valuable pages that are hard to reach

When business goals or website content change, the existing menu needs to be reassessed. Start by drawing a flowchart of one or two menu levels, then check whether pages added over the years fit logically within them. This goes beyond changing menu labels: it can also reveal gaps in the structure.

A page that does not belong in the menu does not necessarily need to be deleted. Some pages remain useful but no longer serve the purpose of the main navigation. For this content, Yoast recommends providing links from related pages and the sitemap so visitors and search engines can still find it.

Check whether categories still reflect the range of content and products

Listing categories, subcategories, and their articles or products in a spreadsheet can help reveal imbalances. For example, if one topic has accumulated many articles while others have only a few, it is worth reviewing the existing categories.

• If one category is much larger than the others, consider splitting it into separate categories.
• If some product lines have become very small, assess whether to combine them.
• If the changes involve deleting categories, arrange redirects as well. Manually maintained HTML sitemaps also need to be updated.

These are considerations for making decisions based on how content is distributed, not requirements for every category to contain the same number of pages.

Assess whether outdated content can be updated rather than simply deleting it

Old articles are not necessarily without value. If an update would make an article relevant to readers’ needs again, it can be revised and republished. If the content is outdated and no one reads it, deletion may be worth considering. These situations need to be handled differently; an article’s age alone should not determine whether it stays or goes.

Before deleting a page, you also need to address its URL: once the original page is gone, visitors following the old URL may encounter a 404 error. Yoast recommends appropriately redirecting deleted pages’ URLs to related pages. The point is to provide a destination relevant to the original need, not merely to stop the URL from returning an error.

Review content performance before deciding whether to merge similar articles

Optimizing multiple articles for overly similar keywords may cause them to compete with one another within the site. If this happens, first review how each article performs, then decide whether to merge some articles and set up redirects, rather than merging everything simply because the keywords are similar.

When merging articles, you can first copy one of the original articles to create a draft and consolidate the content there, avoiding direct edits to an article that is still live. This keeps content editing separate from changes to the live page.