Answer · Website Redesign
How Do You Handle Existing Blog Content During a Redesign?
The short answer
Every blog post goes through the content audit: Keep (ranks well or has traffic), Update (rewrite + restyle), Consolidate (merge with sibling), or Kill (zero traffic + zero links + not strategic). Typically 30-40% Keep, 30-40% Update, 10-20% Consolidate, 10-20% Kill.
№ 01The longer answer
Blog posts are treated like every other URL in the content audit. We pull each post’s data — GSC impressions, GA4 sessions, ranking keywords, backlinks — and assign to one of the four buckets. The data decides; intuition doesn’t.
Keep posts (high traffic OR multiple ranking keywords OR multiple backlinks): port the content as-is, restyle to the new blog template, preserve the URL. No content changes; design changes only. About 30-40% of blog inventory typically lands here.
Update posts (moderate traffic OR 1-2 ranking keywords OR 1+ backlinks): rewrite the body for refreshed angle, current data, modernized examples. URL stays the same so the SEO equity transfers to the rewrite. About 30-40% of inventory.
Consolidate and Kill: many sites have 3-7 posts covering the same topic from different angles, accumulated over years. We merge these into one canonical post (the URL with the most authority) and 301 the others. Posts with truly zero value (zero traffic, zero links, irrelevant topics, AI-generated filler) get 410-deleted. Cleanup typically lifts site-wide topical authority 5-10% within 4-8 weeks.
№ 02What if I want to keep a blog post that the data says to kill?
We accept overrides. The audit is a recommendation. If you have strategic reasons to keep low-traffic posts, document them and we’ll preserve them.
№ 03Will my blog URLs change?
Default: no. Blog post URLs are preserved during redesign unless the structure is broken (e.g., /?p=123 patterns getting migrated to /blog/slug/). Structure changes are flagged before launch.
№ 04Do you write new blog posts as part of the redesign?
Not by default. Blog content production is a separate engagement — either via Care Plan hours or a content retainer. The redesign covers structural and audit work, not new authoring.
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