Runs in your browser. Paste one page per line as url, current_monthly_clicks, previous_peak_clicks. Optionally add a fourth value: months since last update.
Who uses this and why
Dozens of posts, overall traffic drifting down, and no clear sense of which pages to fix. This ranks every page by how much traffic is recoverable so you start where it pays.
Thin, dated, or duplicate articles drag down the whole site's quality signals. The planner tells you what to prune or merge versus what is worth refreshing.
You cannot rewrite everything. Prioritizing by recoverable traffic means your next few hours go to the pages that move the needle most.
Turn a raw traffic export into a defensible keep/refresh/consolidate/prune plan you can hand to a writer or client.
What content decay is, and why every site has it
Content decay is the slow erosion of a page's traffic over time. It is rarely a penalty, it is competition and freshness. Rankings you won two years ago get chipped away as competitors publish newer, deeper content, as search intent shifts, and as your once-current article starts to look dated. The result is a page that used to bring 400 visits a month now bringing 90. Multiply that across a blog and a site can lose a quarter of its traffic without a single dramatic drop. The fix is systematic: find the decayed pages, decide the right action for each, and act on the highest-value ones first.
Keep, refresh, consolidate, or prune
Every page deserves one of four decisions. Keep the pages that are strong and stable, leave them alone. Refresh the ones that had real traffic and have fallen well below their peak; these are your biggest wins because the topic already proved it can rank, it just needs updating, expanding, and re-optimizing. Consolidate faded pages that overlap with a stronger one by merging the useful content in and redirecting. Prune the pages that never had meaningful traffic and never will, redirecting them to the nearest relevant URL rather than simply deleting, which removes low-quality pages that can drag down how search engines and AI models judge the whole site. This planner applies those rules to your numbers and, crucially, sorts by recoverable traffic so effort follows impact.
Knowing the action is not doing it well
The plan tells you a page needs a refresh. Doing the refresh so it actually reclaims rankings, updating for current intent, deepening the content, fixing internal links, re-earning featured snippets and AI citations, is skilled work, and a careless merge or prune can lose rankings you meant to protect. The decisions compound with your site structure and internal linking.
Digital Success runs content audits and refresh programs that turn decaying WordPress archives back into traffic. Let us turn your plan into recovered rankings.
Frequently asked questions
What is content decay?
Is this content pruning tool free?
Should I delete or redirect pruned pages?
How do I know whether to refresh or prune a page?
Does pruning content really help SEO?
Can Digital Success run my content audit?
This tool provides general, illustrative guidance for planning and does not guarantee results. The checklist is shown above so you can verify each item yourself. Last reviewed September 2026 by the Digital Success web & SEO team.
Turn decaying content back into traffic
A plan finds the opportunity; execution reclaims the rankings. Digital Success runs content audits and refresh programs for WordPress sites so faded archives earn again. Let us review your content free.
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