The paragraph you deleted was the one bringing customers

Redesigns almost always shorten a site, because shorter feels cleaner and modern. The material cut is rarely chosen by evidence, and it frequently includes the specific answers that were bringing people through the door.

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Before deleting anything, check whether it receives visitors, produces enquiries, or is linked to from elsewhere. Detailed service descriptions, specific question-and-answer material, cost explanations and old articles that still bring traffic should survive a rebuild even when they feel wordy.

Why redesigns cut content

Design work favours space, and long text is inconvenient to lay out beautifully. So the brief becomes tighter and the words get shortened to fit, page by page, with nobody quite deciding to remove anything important.

The result is a site that looks calmer and answers fewer questions, which reads as elegance internally and as absence to a visitor who wanted an answer.

What to check before cutting

Three questions, answerable from data you should already have from the measurement stage.

  • Does this page receive visitors, particularly from search?
  • Has it ever produced an enquiry or a call?
  • Does anything link to it, internally or from another site?
  • Do customers mention it when asked what they read?

The material most often lost

Certain kinds of content are consistently cut and consistently missed afterwards. Recognising them in advance prevents most of the damage.

Detailed descriptions of what a service includes. Specific answers to questions customers ask. Explanations of cost. Older articles that still quietly bring visitors. Long, unglamorous pages about particular problems, which are often the best-matched pages on the whole site.

Length is not the enemy

There is no virtue in a short page or a long one. There is virtue in answering the question completely, which sometimes takes a while.

The version to aim for is thorough and well organised: clear headings, short paragraphs, and the detail kept. That reads well and continues to match the searches that brought people.

If it must go, merge rather than delete

Where a page genuinely should not survive, move its useful material into whichever page replaces it, then redirect the old address there.

That preserves both the substance and the accumulated value of the address. Deleting outright throws away both, and the loss is usually noticed several months later when nobody remembers what changed.

Beware the opposite error

None of this argues for keeping everything. Genuinely thin, outdated or duplicated pages drag on the site's overall quality and should be merged or removed.

The distinction is evidence rather than instinct: keep what earns or answers something real, remove what does neither, and never decide either way from how the page looks in a design file.

Keep a copy of everything you remove

Whatever you decide to cut, save it before it disappears. A plain text copy of every removed page, kept somewhere findable, costs nothing and occasionally rescues a project.

The situation it protects against is common: two months after launch a page has stopped producing enquiries, and the fastest diagnosis is comparing what it says now with what it said before. Without a copy, that comparison is impossible and the cause stays unknown.

  • Save the full text of anything removed, with its old address.
  • Note the date it was removed.
  • Keep it for at least a year, since problems surface slowly.
  • Store it where the next person will find it, not on one laptop.

How Licheo handles content in a rebuild

Content is treated as an asset with a record attached: what it brings, what it produces, and what links to it. Nothing is removed because it is inconvenient to lay out.

Where something genuinely should go, its useful material moves into the replacement page and the old address is redirected there.

Part of a larger guide

This page is one part of Redesign and revenue. The other parts:

Questions people ask

What content should survive a redesign?
Anything that receives visitors from search, has produced enquiries, or is linked to from elsewhere. In practice that usually means detailed service descriptions, question-and-answer material, cost explanations, and older articles still bringing traffic.
Is a shorter website better?
Not inherently. Answering the question completely is what matters, and that sometimes takes length. Aim for thorough and well organised rather than short, with clear headings and short paragraphs.
How do I decide what to cut?
From evidence rather than appearance: visitors, enquiries, and links. A page that looks awkward in a design file may be the best-matched page on your entire site.
What if a page really has to go?
Merge its useful material into the page that replaces it and redirect the old address there. Deleting outright throws away both the substance and the accumulated value of that address.
Should I ever remove content?
Yes, when it is genuinely thin, outdated or duplicated, because that drags on the site's overall quality. The distinction is evidence: keep what earns or answers something real, remove what does neither.

Keep what was working

Content treated as an asset with a record attached, never removed because it is inconvenient to lay out.

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