Common problems on large websites and how they can be solved

Difficult to Find Information

Nielsen Norman Group, one of the most widely cited usability research groups in the web industry, identifies this as one of the most common reasons visitors fail to accomplish their goals on a website: they simply cannot find what they are looking for. According to Nielsen Norman Group, the problem almost always comes down to one of two things: poor information architecture or a navigation design that does not match how visitors actually think.

The more pages a website accumulates, the more important it becomes to organize content around how visitors search for information, rather than how the organization itself is structured internally. For example, an internal department called “Business Areas” may mean very little to a visitor looking for a specific service.

Unclear Navigation

Menus and categories that worked well when a website had 50 pages are rarely as logical once it has grown to 500 or 5,000. New sections are added wherever seems most natural at the time, rather than according to a well-planned structure. After a few years, the menu becomes a map of how the organization has built the website rather than a map of what visitors are looking for.

Outdated Content

This is not just a matter of perception. It can be measured. Pew Research Center tracked one million web pages from 2013 to 2023 and found that 25 percent of them were no longer accessible by the end of the study. The older the page, the more likely it was to have disappeared: 38 percent of pages that existed in 2013 were no longer available ten years later, compared with just 8 percent of pages from 2023. The problem is also visible on websites with high standards for reliability: 54 percent of Wikipedia reference pages contain at least one link that no longer works.

We see the same pattern among our own clients. Länsförsäkringar Fastighetsförmedling, whose website we have built and continuously developed since 2016, handles around 25,000 property listings per year, with each listing typically remaining online for only one to three weeks. The website was built with exactly this in mind: pages are constantly being added, updated and removed, rather than assuming that content will remain unchanged.

Even content that remains online can become a risk over time if it is never updated or removed. It creates confusion for visitors who cannot determine what information is still relevant, while also making it more difficult for editors to keep track of what actually needs to be updated.

How to Solve It in Practice

The solution starts with reviewing the existing content and creating a clearer structure based on what visitors actually need to find, rather than how the organization itself is structured.

Removing outdated and duplicated content is not just a matter of cleaning up. It can have a measurable impact. Agency Inflow removed around 200 underperforming pages from its client Home Science Tools’ blog. Organic visits increased by 104 percent and transactions by 102 percent afterwards. In other words, removing content can be just as valuable an investment as creating new content.

Navigation and categorization should then be improved based on the new, streamlined structure, not the other way around. To prevent the same problem from returning a year later, clear guidelines are needed for how new content should be published, who owns what, and when content should be reviewed or removed again.

Want to Review Your Website?

At Toxic, we help organizations restructure large, established websites so that both visitors and editors can find what they need.

👉 Read more about our web solutions