I am working with a client to migrate a web site from the existing production hardware into a new hardware environment. Now seems like an excellent time to perform an audit and remove any old or obsolete content rather than just blindly copy it again.
Are there any good free tools or scripts I can use to compare the web accessible content on a server to the actual files on a server to see what content is actually being linked to and used?
Thanks in advance for any help!
I'm sure there is but I'm sure there isn't one that could do a better job than you could yourself, ya know? How big is this site and did you code it yourself?
Well, for starters you can use a tool like Xenu's Link Sleuth to spider all of your pages to find broken links and the like. We used this tool on our intranet to find and fix our broken links. It's free and gets the job done.
Another tool that we have used for migrations between systems is a search engine. A good search engine will spider all of your pages and show the two-way relationship between links. This can help you find what content is being linked to the most and what is possibly orphaned. Unfortunately, these kinds of tools are not free.