What a messy pantry teaches us about organizing website content

You know when your pantry’s been working just fine… until it’s not?

There’s cumin in three different little baggies. A half-empty bag of flour you didn’t know you already had. Tins that expired pre-COVID. And the salt, still labeled “Salt Table” from those old pre-printed Tupperware stickers. The label puts the main word first and the descriptor underneath, which never made sense to my kids. Every time I ask for the salt, they hold it up and ask, “Is this Salt Table, Mum?” It’s a small thing, but it slows them down and adds unnecessary friction.

Eventually, there’s no room left to put anything new. You start stuffing boxes and bags into whatever gap you can find, hoping it all won’t fall out when one of the kids pulls out a bag of snacks.

Website content can feel exactly the same.

This isn’t just something we see in food blogs. We work with clients in travel, furniture, events, and more, and it’s always the same pattern. A site grows over time, but the structure doesn’t grow with it.

Sometimes it’s not just the structure, it’s what’s quietly piling up in the background. One client recently discovered that years of large image uploads had ballooned their disk usage. Before we even get to the redesign, we need to clean out oversized, duplicate, or outdated files. It’s all part of the same process: making sure what’s there is intentional, useful, and not getting in the way.

What was once a major focus might no longer be relevant. New products or offerings have been added but haven’t been properly woven into the rest of the site. Navigation becomes cluttered. Labels lose meaning. Different people put things in different spots. It becomes harder for you and your visitors to manage.

When clients come to us, the most common things they say are: “I want a better menu and navigation so people can actually find what they’re looking for,” or “My content needs reorganizing. It’s become hard to manage.”

This is one of my favorite parts of the redesign process.

A website redesign is the perfect time to do this kind of clean-out. It’s a chance to step back and reevaluate everything with a clear, critical eye, and to be a little ruthless about what’s no longer serving you or your readers. Now’s the time to let them go and make space for what matters.

You don’t need to figure it all out ahead of time. We guide you through the process and help you make confident decisions, step by step.

We begin with a conversation about how your site has evolved, what your readers are coming for, and what the core focus is now. We then walk you through different ways your content could be grouped: by things like course, diet, cuisine, time, method, or topic. You don’t have to know what you want up front. We’ll show you what’s possible and help you find what fits best.

Not everything has to be visible to readers right away. Some categories may be useful to have in the background as your content grows. As a rough guide, we usually recommend having at least six recipes (or pieces of content) in a category before making it part of your public navigation.

Together, we figure out what makes sense to keep, what needs to be renamed or combined, and what needs to be deleted (with redirects as appropriate). We bring structure to the chaos and help you feel in control of your content again. We also make sure everything is consistent: formatting, naming, singular versus plural, natural orderings, and whether your content structure reflects what you actually create now.

The result is a site that feels calm. Clean. Easy to use. You know where everything belongs. Your readers feel taken care of. You have a system that will grow with you, not get in your way.

If your site is starting to feel more chaotic than helpful, we’d love to help you sort it out. It’s one of the most satisfying things we do!