What is “Page valuation”, and why it’s important

WordPress Migration.

Unless you’re lucky enough to be updating your WordPress platform, the harsh reality is that migrating to WordPress will involve moving content. Maybe a lot of it

But do you really need to move it all?

If you have 1,000 pages of information going back to 2005 you should really ask yourself if all of it needs to move over. Seriously, what is the value of a opinion article written about house prices before 2007?

Where to start

It’s an iterative process that goes something like this:

  • Quarantine the dead pages
  • Give each remaining page a value
  • Sort the pages by that value
  • Start at the top and work down until the value is not worth the effort of moving the content

Now we just need a way a value a page, and preferably automatically to do this. Start with Google Analytics, or whatever reporting app you use and order them by pageviews for the last year. All pages scoring zero get quarantined, they are the dead one.

Then export the remaining data into an XL spreadsheet, as a list of pages with the number of views against them, time on page. Recency has value, so has number of views but the latter is more important so adopt a calculation based on, and in order of priority:

  • Number of page views
  • Average time spent on page
  • Age of item

You can then order the pages how you choose and adjust the rating to make it fit. Try it with lots of different page examples.

You could go one stage further and assign the actual cost to produce the page, say £50, and from there you could measure the cost per viewer, or per viewer second.