Create a category and WordPress builds the archive page for you. It is a genuinely useful default: you never have to hand-build a listing screen.
The catch is that the page contains not one sentence written by a person. A heading and a list. The list refreshes itself whenever you publish, so nobody ever opens that page again.
What happens to a page that is only a list
Picture someone meeting that page in search results. The title drew them in, and what they find is a list. Nothing tells them which article to start with, or what this site has to say about the subject, so they go back.
Twenty such pages compound the problem. Individually harmless, collectively they make the whole site read as thin — even though all the substance is sitting in the articles themselves.
Three things the intro should answer
It does not need to be long. Two or three paragraphs, answering three questions.
① What is this subject? The category name alone will not do it. Say in one sentence whether “performance” here includes caching, images, databases, server configuration, or some subset.
② Who needs it? Describe the situation someone is in when they look for this, and the right reader recognises themselves immediately.
③ Where should I start? This is the most valuable line on the page. Listings are usually reverse-chronological, but a first-time visitor does not need your newest post — they need the introductory one. Link straight to it from the intro.
If you cannot write the intro, do not index the page
That gives you a decision rule. An archive you cannot write an introduction for should stay out of search. Having nothing to say about it means the grouping is not yet a subject.
Excluding a page from the index does not remove it. Visitors still use it, and crawlers still travel through its links; it simply does not appear as a result of its own. Most SEO plugins set this once, per taxonomy.
Write it once, refresh occasionally
Intros do not update themselves, so revisit one when its subject has grown substantially. The “where should I start” line in particular has to change when a better introductory article appears. Once a quarter is plenty.
If you want to see subject archives used this way in practice, this site’s SEO archive is the example, and our free tools page is built on the same principle.
Next part
With the structure in place, it is time to look back at what you have already published. The next part is the content audit — how to decide between keeping, updating, merging and retiring.