Migrating a Blog - An Opportunity for a Content Inventory

When I recently moved this site from Wordpress to Hugo, one of the best parts of the process was that I had a chance to do a content inventory of my posts.

I highly recommend this to anyone, even if they are not migrating platforms.

I had about 120 posts since I had last relaunched my site. This was a chance to go through and think about what was worth keeping.

This is something that doesn't get done a lot on the web - thinking about what to get rid of.

Here is what I did - using a Wordpress Plugin, I exported a CSV of all my posts, with their title, created date, modified date, and URL.

I then opened that in Google Sheets, and proceeded to go down the list. I ended up keeping just over 50 posts, so I removed more than half.

What was criteria for removal?

• It was super timely, and hardly relevant anymore (i.e. was related to some product announcement)
• Frankly, the older it was, the more likely it was to go
• If it referred to something that I don't really work in anymore (i.e. some of my old Drupal posts)
• If it triggered a "twinge" in me - if I felt embarrassed looking back at it, out it went

That said, I also looked at my Google Analytics and made sure that my top 20 posts or so were retained.

Just remember - just because you blogged it once, doesn't mean you need to keep it.