I am working on a client's website. It currently runs on WordPress and has a ton of pages which are badly created keyword stuffed, and not user friendly at all.Our plan is to completely overhaul the website and delete all pages on the domain.We are not going to use WordPress and will create pages ourselves.Let's imagine we have created perfect pages and done everything correct according to the book, how will the removal of ALL the old pages on the WordPress platform  affect our ranking?Will this domain get a bad reputation because of the removal, even though the new pages are perfectly optimized and legal?
Overhaul website - completely remove old content?
seo;domains;wordpress;content;optimization
Nice question, here are some guides for doing that on that level.1. CRAWL YOUR SITEWhen you redesign your website, theres a good chance that URLs will change.  If URLs change, you absolutely have to inform the engines where those older URLs have moved to.  If you dont, you can destroy your SEO power. All of the equity those old URLs have built up can be wiped out.  And when that happens, your rankings drop, organic search traffic drops, sales drop, revenue drops, and heads roll.  Thats why understanding all of your current URLs is critically important.The good news is that there are several ways to understand your current URLs.  I highly recommend you crawl your own site, which can reveal many of your current URLs.2. Perform an Inbound Link AnalysisInbound links are incredibly important for building SEO power. And, theres a huge risk in losing those powerful inbound links if you change your URL structure. I highly recommend performing an inbound link analysis to fully understand your link profile.  Know the pages linking to you, and where they are linking. Then make sure your developers understand that those pages must be migrated.  And make sure you utilize 301 redirects when pointing your old URLs to your new ones.  More on 301s in the next section of this post. There are several tools you can use to perform an inbound link analysis, including Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO Tools. Get familiar with them, and dont skip this step during a redesign or migration.3. The 301 Redirection planThis is the heart of your migration from an SEO standpoint. If there is one thing you need to get right during the redesign, its this step. As Ive explained already, you need to make sure all of your older pages 301 redirect to their newer counterparts.  301 redirects will safely pass PageRank from your older pages to the newer ones, and will enable you to maintain your Search Equity. If you fail at this stage, your trending could very well look like the graphs I included earlier. Dont botch the 301 redirection plan.4. Analyze Site ReportingWhen redesigning or migrating your website, you should absolutely analyze your current site reporting.  Specifically, you can focus on the top content, landing pages, and referring sites reports. They will help you gain a solid understanding of which pages are visited most, which are the top landing pages, and which pages are receiving the most referring traffic. And by the way, if you have landing pages receiving referring traffic, then that means there are external links pointing to those pages.5. Dont Drop Optimization During the Redesign or MigrationImagine you have 500 pages of optimized content on your current website. You have strong rankings and traffic, and life is good.  Then you redesign your site, and drop most of your on-page optimization when the redesign is launched. Needless to say, your rankings and traffic could suffer greatly. I wish this was rare, but its not. Many times, marketers dont understand the power of on-page optimization, keyword research performed in the past, uniquely optimized pages, etc. Then the new pages either have the same general optimization across the site, or a scaled down version.