Content maintenance plan

What a content maintenance plan is

A content maintenance plan is an operational schedule. Every page you own gets a review date and a named person, and those dates are sorted into a month-by-month task list that somebody works through. January's list has eleven pages on it with a name beside each. That is the whole idea, and it is duller and more useful than it sounds.

It is not the policy that sets the intervals. Deciding that price pages get read every quarter, guides every year, and anything mentioning legislation whenever the legislation moves is a content lifecycle plan, which also decides when a page is refreshed, merged or deleted. That is the thinking. This is the calendar that results from it, with dates and names on it, run month to month.

Which you need depends on where you are. If nobody has ever decided how often anything should be reviewed, start with the lifecycle plan and this follows from it in an afternoon. If the rules exist, or are obvious for your trade, and the problem is that nothing gets done, buy this one.

When you need one

The common trigger is an embarrassment. A customer rings about a price that changed eighteen months ago, a page still names a staff member who left, or a service you stopped offering is still being sold. One of those is an accident. Two means nothing has a review date.

The second case is a site grown past the point where anyone can hold it in their head. Somewhere around sixty pages a business stops knowing what it has published, and pages age silently instead of being noticed.

You do not need this if your site is a dozen pages and you reread them every spring. Nor is it right if the real problem is that pages have stopped earning, which is a different symptom: content decay analysis catches a page sliding while a rewrite can still rescue it. Ageing and decaying are not the same thing, and this plan addresses the first.

What goes in it

• The page list, with owners. Every live page, the person responsible for its accuracy, and the date it was last genuinely read rather than merely visited.
• The priority tiers. Pages carrying prices, legal or regulatory statements, staff names, opening hours, coverage areas and certifications go in the top tier and are read most often. Explanatory articles sit in the middle. Pages that cannot go wrong sit at the bottom and are read yearly at most.
• The dated task list. Twelve months of it, each month naming the pages due, the person doing them, and roughly how long it takes. A month with thirty pages in it is rebalanced before the year starts, not during it.
• The standing monthly checks. The small jobs due every month regardless of which pages are up: a run of the link check, a look at anything with a date in the copy, and a glance at the contact details.
• The trigger list. The events that pull a review forward whatever the schedule says: a price change, a staff departure, a new location, a change in the rules your trade works under.
• The record. One line per review: page, date, who did it, and what changed, or that nothing did. Without it the plan quietly stops after four months and nobody can say when.

What you get

The schedule. One document, twelve months, every page dated and owned, on a shared drive or in whatever project tool you already use. It is yours and it keeps working without me.

A one-page reviewer's checklist. What to look at when a page comes up: figures, dates, names, links, images, the promise in the first paragraph, and whether the page still describes something you sell. Reviews without a checklist turn into proofreading.

The first month done. I work the first month's list myself so the plan starts with the work happening rather than with an intention, and so the estimates in it are real ones.

Optional monthly running. Where you would rather not do it, I run the list each month and send a short note of what changed. That is a monthly arrangement, priced separately.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A specialist flooring supplier with a showroom and an installation team has about ninety pages built up over eight years: forty product pages, twenty how-to guides, a dozen service and area pages, and the rest old blog posts. The owner discovers that three product pages still quote prices from before a supplier increase, and that the guarantee page describes terms that changed last year.

The plan puts the twelve pages carrying prices or guarantee terms into a quarterly tier, the service and area pages into a half-yearly tier, and the guides and old posts into a yearly one, which spreads to six to nine pages a month. The showroom manager owns the product pages; the office administrator owns the rest. The first month's reviews turn up the two known errors, four dead links, a phone number that has not been current since the second location opened, and eleven old posts that go onto a separate list to be rewritten or removed rather than reviewed forever. A year later nothing on the site is more than twelve months unread.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. How many pages, what changes most often in your trade, and who could realistically review them. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before anything starts, with the optional monthly running priced separately.
3. The page list. Pulled from your website. If you already have a content inventory, this step is done and the price drops.
4. Tiering and dating. Two to four working days: pages sorted into tiers, intervals applied, the year balanced so no month is impossible.
5. The first month worked. The first list actually completed, with the corrections made or sent to whoever makes them.
6. Handover. Half an hour with the named owners, then the schedule, the checklist and the record sheet are yours.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the job is sized by how many pages you have and how many carry facts that expire. Running the plan month to month is quoted separately, and for most businesses that ends up inside the wider pipeline service rather than standing alone. The pricing page shows the four ways I work. The number is fixed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

The first pass through a maintenance plan nearly always produces a pile of pages that are beyond reviewing and need rewriting, which is an outdated page refresh. It also produces a list of dead links longer than anyone expects, and link checking deals with those on a standing basis. Where the reviews keep finding the same material in three places, the fix is deleting, merging and redirecting rather than maintaining all three forever. None of that is assumed. The plan is a complete piece of work on its own and it will run without me.