Glossary

How to Create a Website Content Inventory (+ Template)

A content inventory catalogs every page on your site so you can quickly assess what you have, spot gaps or duplicate content, and prioritize updates — making it the essential first step before a full website audit. This guide explains how to create a practical content inventory, what fields to include, and includes a ready-to-use template to jumpstart your review and improvement process.

Content Inventory

A content inventory is a structured, itemized list of all content assets on a website or digital property—such as pages, documents, images, videos, and metadata—typically including identifiers (URLs), content type, title, author, last modified date, status, and key attributes (e.g., word count, taxonomy, analytics), used to audit, manage, migrate, or optimize content.

Why Is a Website Content Inventory Important?

A website content inventory is important because it turns a chaotic collection of pages and assets into a clear, actionable map you can use to make better content decisions. Key benefits:

Visibility and control: Reveals every asset (pages, docs, images, media, metadata) so nothing is overlooked during audits, migrations, or updates.

Prioritization and efficiency: Helps you identify high-impact pages, duplicates, outdated content, and low-value assets so resources focus where they matter most.

SEO and performance gains: Surfaces thin content, missing metadata, and slow or unindexed pages that harm search performance and user engagement.

Risk and compliance management: Flags regulated content, licensing issues, and privacy-sensitive assets to reduce legal and policy risks.

Migration and redesign readiness: Serves as the single source of truth for planning site restructures, CMS changes, or content migrations—minimizing loss and rework.

Consistency and governance: Supports taxonomy, style, and brand standards by documenting authorship, ownership, status, and editorial workflows.

Data-driven decisions: Combines qualitative fields with analytics (traffic, conversions) to guide retention, consolidation, or redevelopment choices.

Cost savings and ROI: Eliminates redundant content and reduces maintenance overhead by clarifying what to update, archive, or remove.

Bottom line: a content inventory converts content chaos into a strategic asset, enabling faster audits, better UX, improved SEO, and more efficient content operations.

Content Inventory vs. Content Audit: What’s the Difference?

Definition

Content inventory: An objective, itemized catalog of every content asset on a site—such as URLs, file types, titles, metadata, status, and metrics. It’s a snapshot: complete, factual, and structured, used to manage, migrate, or optimize content.

Content audit: A qualitative assessment and strategic review of those assets that evaluates quality, performance, relevance, SEO, UX, and business alignment, and delivers prioritized recommendations.

Primary purpose

Inventory: Discover and document what exists so nothing is overlooked during migration, redesign, or governance.

Audit: Analyze and decide what to keep, improve, consolidate, remove, or create to meet goals.

Typical outputs

Inventory: A spreadsheet or database with fields like URL, page title, content type, author, last modified date, status, word count, taxonomy, traffic, and conversions.

Audit: Scorecards, gap analysis, an action plan, SEO fixes, content owners, and recommended next steps with timelines.

When to run each

Inventory: The initial step for any redesign, migration, governance effort, or large-scale content project.

Audit: Follows the inventory when you need to improve content quality, search visibility, user experience, or conversion performance.

Who does what

Inventory: Often done by content managers, developers, or analysts who gather and export data using site crawlers, CMS exports, and analytics.

Audit: Typically a cross-functional team—content strategists, SEO, UX, product, and stakeholders—who interpret data and set strategy.

How they work together

The inventory provides the raw dataset; the audit applies criteria and business context to that dataset to produce decisions and prioritized actions.

Quick checklist (use after creating the inventory)

Tag content by status: keep, update, delete, archive.

Score pages: quality and performance (traffic, engagement, conversions).

Identify issues: duplicates, thin content, and gaps against target keywords and personas.

Map owners: assign next steps with timelines.

Create a plan: migration or updates based on audit recommendations.

Bottom line

Inventory = what you have. Audit = what you should do about it. Both are essential and sequential: start with a thorough inventory, then run an audit to turn data into strategy.