Scale changes the problems
A twenty-page site is a design problem. A four-hundred-page site is an organisation problem, and the design matters far less than whether anything can be found.
Most large sites grew rather than being planned, which is why they are difficult to navigate.
Taxonomy first
- Decide the categories that genuinely reflect how visitors think
- Keep the number small — fifteen is usually plenty
- Use tags for cross-cutting themes, sparingly
- Review annually and merge what has fragmented
Taxonomies grow by accident. A site with ninety tags, sixty of which are used once, has no taxonomy — it has a mess with a name.
Internal search becomes critical
At volume, visitors search rather than browse. Default WordPress search is poor — it matches words rather than meaning and it ranks by date.
Improving it is one of the highest-return changes on a large site, and it is measurable through your search logs.
Maintenance at volume
- A review schedule — every page checked at least annually
- An owner for each content area
- Regular crawls for broken links and orphans
- A process for retiring content rather than accumulating it
Retire, do not accumulate
| Content | Action |
|---|---|
| Still accurate, still gets traffic | Keep and update |
| Accurate, no traffic | Improve or merge |
| Out of date, gets traffic | Update urgently |
| Out of date, no traffic | Remove, with a redirect |
That four-way sort applied annually keeps a large site healthy rather than sprawling.