Managing backlogs of web content: where to start

Content team, 20 November 2024, Content design, Content maintenance

Most organisations create more content than they can manage. But publishing content without a plan to review and look after it can cause all sorts of problems for users and the organisation later on.

Content maintenance is one of the most important yet neglected and misunderstood parts of content design. It’s the idea that content is never just published and left. You have to revisit it regularly to:

see how it’s performing,
check it’s still useful and accurate, meeting your users’ needs,
edit it, keep it, or archive it.

Content maintenance does not have to be a big job, but it does have to be a regular one.

Why it’s important

Content people might feel like they have to create new content to add value. It can be hard to make a case for deleting things instead. But there are several reasons why maintaining content is important.

Some of the benefits are:

improved search – people can find content faster and more easily if you remove old information from your site,
brand reputation – old information that is not updated can be inaccurate, and makes you look like a less reliable source of information,
cost – maintaining content that is not needed has financial costs for your organisation, and environmental costs too,
relevance – new, up to date content is not buried below older, outdated information.

For example, your organisation might publish a press release every year announcing its priorities for the year. If the previous outdated press releases aren’t removed, when someone searches for that press release they will be presented with multiple different versions from each year. The top result might not be the most recent one, and it can be confusing and frustrating.

Organisations will often think they need to keep old content ‘just in case’, or because it might be useful to someone. Check your analytics and see if this is actually the case, or if you’re burying your useful content in your search results.

Make your process work for you

Content maintenance should start when you’re planning your content. At the initial stages (for example, when you’re creating user needs), take the time to think about content maintenance. You’ll want to decide things like:

how you will determine if the content is performing well once published,
who needs to be involved in reviewing the content.

You’ll also need to decide how often to review the content. There’s no single answer for this. Some content might be related to a certain event or period of time, so it makes sense to remove it soon after. For example, if you’re running a summer movie night, you might want to remove the content once the event is over.

Other content might have a longer life, for example if it’s information about the history of your organisation. It might be suitable to review this content every year.

Some content will have information that has the potential to go out of date. This might include content that:

mentions certain people or roles and their contact details,
covers a specific policy or viewpoint that might change (for example with an election or change in management),
relates to a specific event.

Think about if it makes sense to review this content at a particular point, for example after an election.

Reviewing your content

Make sure you identify all the people who need to be involved in the review. They should be included and informed of what you find.

When it’s time to review your content, check if it’s:

performing – for example use analytics, feedback and user research to see how well the content is working and meeting user needs,
relevant – decide if it’s out of date, about something that has passed, or is no longer relevant.

From this work you should be able to get a clear view of whether content should be updated, kept as is, or archived.

If the content needs to be updated, agree on how much of a priority the update is and when it will be done. This can then be considered as part of your wider content work.

If the content is still up to date and can be kept, set a date for the next review.

Prioritising reviews for current content

Ideally you will agree to a content maintenance plan as part of creating a new piece of content. But if you do not currently have a process in place, chances are you will need to review content that already exists too.

Once you’ve established how you will review content, try to prioritise the order that the reviews will take place. You could prioritise by:

the date the content was published, starting with the oldest,
how the content is performing, for example starting with the most viewed pages,
what content is the most out of date, for example you could get a subject matter expert to read through all your content to check for factual inaccuracies.

As a content person, it might be that you're there to both run, and potentially help others run, a content maintenance process. If you’re not leading on the content review, you might be able to support by talking to content owners about some of the challenges they face maintaining their content and exploring potential solutions with them.

If you’re not sure where to start, read Lauren Pope’s guide on prioritisation for content teams.

Conclusion

It might seem like cheating to spend a day deleting old content instead of creating new content. And content maintenance can seem like a big task. But in terms of value to your users, your search results, and even your environmental footprint it’s one of the most important things a content designer can do.