Too many pages make life difficult for your visitors

Your website should focus on the most important tasks of your users.

Unfortunately, many sites do not do it. They have everything they have done and more on their website.

Result: a website with many pages that nobody cares.

Is it really so bad? I mean, a user can ignore pages that do not interest him, right?

Theoretically, yes. However, in practice, these additional pages provide a more complex navigation structure, more links, and more choices. Which makes it difficult for people to find what they are looking for.

If your site focuses on the things people really use, there will be fewer pages and people will find what they need much faster. Because there is no mess to distract them.

Less is more. More conversion More satisfied visitors. More return on investment.
Use Google Analytics to find rarely visited pages

I use Google Analytics as an example because it is the most used tool. Of course, you can also use other analysis tools.

1. Define a sufficiently long period

For a first analysis, I usually need 6 months.

In this way, I minimize the risk that the results of my results will be set aside by people accusing the holidays, the weather or other things of the lack of visitors on “their” sites.
Heck, if your website is subject to strong seasonal variations, do it for 12 months.

2. Navigate to the “All Pages” report

• When you click Behaviour> Site Content, the All Pages report is displayed. Here you can see the unique pages that you visited during the period you chose.
• At the bottom of the table, you can see the total number of unique pages visited.
• Check this number based on the total number of pages on your site. If the second number is much larger than the first, I have bad news for you: they have many pages that no one visits.

3. Click on the “Advanced” link at the top of the search box

Do not worry. There is nothing advanced about what we are going to do.

4. Select “Unique PageViews” from the drop-down menu

I always choose “unique page views” because the “page views” are somewhat artificial. If a person visits the same site five times during a visit, Google Analytics considers them to be five page views, but only as a single page.

5. Enter a number

For an initial analysis, I would normally like to have an overview of all pages with less than 50 pages viewed over a six-month period. I think it’s pretty generous … of course, you can change that Number to 100 or more.

6. Click on “Apply”

Almost there. On the screen you see, you can already see how many pages have been viewed less than 50 times.

7. Sort of “Unique PageViews”.

This sorts the results by the number of unique page views. The default value is the total number of pages viewed. It’s not ideal for our report.

8. Save the report

Click Link at the top of the page to save this report for later analysis. Name this report for easy access from the Links menu.

What do you know now?

You know which pages have been Visited less than x times in the period you have chosen. I hope this issue did not shock you.

We recently had to tell a customer that more than 80% of their web pages have been visited less than 50 times in the last 6 months. Not the best news, but they did it really well. They decided to spend the next 12 months managing existing content instead of creating new pages.

Is this a reason enough to get rid of a page?

Not always, but there is a good clue.

Apart from cold and hard numbers, there are other things to keep in mind:

• Conversion rate

If the conversion rate is (a lot) higher than the average, you have to wonder why this page is not visited more often. Is there a way to get more people to visit this page?

• Because you have to

Sometimes, but only sometimes, it’s a valid reason. Not because your boss tells you, but because it’s a page you need for legal reasons.

• the search for the user

Interviewing clients, analyzing your search function and other user research methods can help you understand what your visitors are doing a top job.

We always recommend combining the log file scan with one of these methods: Log files can only tell you what users are doing on your website, not what they want or do not want to find.

If one of your visitors’ main tasks is one of the least visited pages on your site, you know there is a lot to do.

What do you do with rarely visited pages?

• Delete The Pages

For most pages at the bottom of the list: just click the Delete button. This article you wrote two years ago will not be missed. Goodbye and good riddance.

• cluster information

Many pages use 10 pages where they should only have one page. Get together and have the courage to get rid of things nobody cares about. Cut the fat. Stay with the essentials.

• reactivate

Reactivate interest for pages that have a high conversion rate or are one of the main tasks of your visitors. Some options: Put a link on the home page, give it a more important place in your navigation, rewrite the page, create more links to the page, etc.

• Let them rot in the darkest holes of your site

This only applies to pages that you must keep for legal reasons. Make sure to bury them deep where they will probably not disturb people.

Working with the best SEO company, help you to optimize your website & to get more traffic.