You’ve drafted content for your website, edited it, and posted it online for everyone to read. So you’re done, right? Not quite!
Content reviews are an ongoing part of the content management lifecycle and very important when doing a content migration. Once a year, you should go through all your existing content to make sure it’s relevant, consistent, and meeting the needs of your audience. A content review can help you both ask and answer valuable questions about the types of content you’re creating, why you’re creating it, and what you can do better in the future.
So you’ve been asked to complete a content review. How do you get started? The first step is to start with a list of all your site content. ACF content inventories are generated as Excel spreadsheets from Drupal. These lists tell you exactly how much content you have, where it lives on the site, and how it is organized. The next step is to evaluate your content’s effectiveness by looking at how everything fits together as a whole. The last step is to “clean house” by going through your content, updating information (if needed) and fixing basic errors you spot like typos, misspellings, and broken links.
Content inventories are a good way to see everything at once, and to help make decisions about what content to keep and which content should be removed from your site. We encourage you to use the following tips to conduct your reviews and better identify the paths, patterns, and relationships of your content.
Tip #1: Conduct a ROT Analysis
Use the ROT Analysis technique! This means you should update or remove content that is:
- Redundant (already posted elsewhere)
- Outdated* (old content that is no longer relevant)
- Trivial (content that could be included in another place and/or is insignificant as of now)
* review archive guidelines for records management purposes and flag content to be transitioned to the archive
Tip #2: Prioritize Your Content
Review your most frequented pages and high priority content including:
- Home Page Nav/Content
- All landing pages
- Critical Resources and Assets
Tip #3: Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics can tell you how often a page is visited, as well as if the page is doing an effective job of conveying information.
Review Basic Web Traffic Numbers:
- Page views
- Sessions
- Viewers
- New vs. Returning Visitors
Review Bounce Rate:
- If the bounce rate is very high, this means most people visited this page and then exited the site. This is good if your goal was to connect them to information on another page or site. A high bounce rate is not so good if your goal was to keep them engaged on your site.
Review Time on Page:
- The average time on page is generally quite low, but you should take a look at this if you have large resources to see if people are actually reading them
Tip #4: Read Your Feedback
Do you know site viewers can give feedback about whether or not your page content is helpful? This is a great way to see if your content is helping people complete their tasks.
Review Site Feedback in Drupal:
- Review if your visitors marked pages as helpful
- Note any comments or feedback
- Make updates to reflect user input, where necessary