What is a content health check?

Most organisations have far more content than they think, and far less of it in good shape than they'd like. A health check is how you find out where you stand – calmly, criterion by criterion – and what to do about it.

How is a content health check different from a content audit?

A content audit is typically a one-off stocktake: what content exists, what it's for, and broad decisions to keep, update or remove it. A content health check goes deeper on quality – scoring each piece against explicit criteria – and works best as a repeated practice rather than a single event.

The two overlap, and the terms are often used loosely. A useful way to keep them straight:

• Content inventory – what do we have? A list of your content: URLs, titles, owners, dates. The raw material for everything else.
• Content audit – what should we do with it? A review of the inventory, usually ending in keep / improve / consolidate / remove decisions.
• Content health check – how good is it, and is it getting better? A criteria-based quality assessment, scored and repeatable, so you can track improvement over time.

An audit gives you a snapshot. A health check gives you a baseline – and then a trend line.

What does a content health check cover?

A thorough health check assesses every dimension of quality that affects whether content serves its readers: from mechanical basics like spelling and structure to harder questions like whether a page is convincing, on-brand and strategically worthwhile.

Our Content Health Framework uses fifteen criteria. Whatever framework you use, it should cover this ground:

• Accessible – can everyone consume it, regardless of ability or context?
• Actionable – does it give readers a clear, relevant next step?
• Comprehensive – does it cover what readers reasonably expect, without padding?
• Convincing – are claims supported by evidence and credible sources?
• Engaging – does it hold attention rather than merely occupy space?
• Error-free – is it free of spelling, grammar and factual mistakes?
• Meaningful – does it have a clear point a reader could summarise afterwards?
• On-brand – does it sound like you, consistently?
• Readable – is the language right for the audience?
• Shareable – does it contain ideas worth passing on?
• Strategic – does it serve both reader needs and organisational goals?
• Structured – do headings and flow help people scan and understand?
• Succinct – could it deliver the same value in fewer words?
• Up-to-date – does it reflect current facts, terminology and practice?
• Useful – does it actually help someone do or decide something?

Each criterion is defined in detail – why it matters, how it's evaluated and what good looks like – in the framework.

How do you run a content health check?

Build an inventory, choose your criteria, score a representative sample of content against them, prioritise fixes by impact, then re-check on a regular cadence. You can do this manually with a spreadsheet, or use a tool to assess at scale.

The manual process:

1. Build the inventory. Crawl your site (or export from your CMS) to list every page worth assessing. Note URL, title, owner and last-updated date.
2. Choose your criteria. Use the fifteen above, or a subset. The discipline matters more than the exact list – but write down what each criterion means before you start scoring, or your scores won't be comparable.
3. Score a sample. For a large estate, start with your most-visited and most strategically important pages. Score each against each criterion on a consistent scale (we use five levels). Be tough; charitable scoring defeats the purpose.
4. Prioritise. Cross-reference low scores with high importance. A weak page nobody visits can wait. A weak page on your money path can't.
5. Fix, then re-check. Make the improvements, and put a date in the diary to score again. Content decays – strategy shifts, facts age, links rot. One pass is a clean-up; a cadence is a practice.

Two people scoring the same page will disagree, scoring 200 pages by hand takes weeks, and consistency drifts as fatigue sets in. That's the limitation of the manual route – and it's fine for a first pass on a small site.

Should you use a consultant or a tool?

It depends on what you need. A consultant brings judgement, context and a fresh pair of eyes, and suits a one-off strategic review. A tool brings consistency, scale and repeatability, and suits ongoing monitoring of a larger content estate. Many organisations sensibly use both.

A skilled human reviewer will catch things no automated system will – organisational politics baked into a page, a tone that's technically fine but subtly wrong for a moment. If your estate is small and your need is a one-time expert opinion, a consultant review is a good investment.

Where humans struggle is scale and consistency: hundreds of pages, scored the same way, re-scored quarterly. That's the job Content Health Check was built for – AI-assisted assessment against all fifteen criteria, with page-level detail and an estate-wide view that tracks change over time.

Frequently asked questions