Content lifecycle plan

What a content lifecycle plan is

A content lifecycle plan is the standing schedule for work you have already published. It sorts your content into a handful of classes, gives each class a review interval, lists the events that trigger a refresh before the interval comes round, and sets the tests for when two pages should become one and when a page should be taken down.

The output is a dated calendar. Not a policy about reviewing things, but a list that says these eighteen pages are looked at in March and these forty in June, and who is looking.

It is most often confused with content governance. Governance names the people; the lifecycle plan sets the dates. Governance says the product pages belong to the sales manager. The lifecycle plan says they are reviewed in January and July and immediately whenever a price changes. They are written together often, and they answer different questions.

It is also not a content refresh plan, which is a one-off ordered list of the pages to fix now. The lifecycle plan is the standing rule that keeps generating that list, year after year, without anyone having to notice.

When you need one

Three situations. Your site is more than about three years old and you no longer know which pages are still true. Something in your business changes on a predictable rhythm — prices, staff, legislation, product lines — and the site is always the last thing updated. Or you keep commissioning new pages because nobody can face working out whether the existing ones still stand.

If your site is a year old and twenty pages, you do not need a plan. Put a date in the diary and read them. What you probably want instead is one hard look at everything you have, which tells you what state you are actually in.

What goes in it

• The content classes. Usually four or five: pages with a price or a legal statement, service and product pages, evergreen guides, dated commentary, and policy pages. Each gets its own interval, because a pricing page and a two-year-old opinion piece do not age at the same speed.
• The refresh triggers. The events that pull a review forward regardless of the calendar: a price change, a staff departure, a discontinued product, a rule change in your trade, a link that has died.
• The merge test. The three or four questions that decide whether two overlapping pages should become one, so the decision is not reargued each time it comes up.
• The retirement test. When a page comes down rather than being rewritten again, and what happens to its address afterwards: redirected, left in place, or removed properly.
• The calendar. The whole lot turned into dates for the next twelve months, spread so that no single month carries a review nobody has time for.

What you get

The plan. Three to five pages: the classes, the intervals, the triggers and the two tests, written so a person who has never seen it can apply it correctly.

The dated register. A spreadsheet of every page with its class, its owner, its next review date and its last review date. This is the document that does the actual work.

The decision one-pager. The merge and retirement tests on a single sheet, for the person sitting in front of a page wondering whether to bother.

A one-hour session. On video, running the first month of the calendar together, so the first reviews happen while I am still involved rather than three months after I have gone.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Fredericton landscaping supplier has about 210 pages: twelve service pages, thirty product pages, eight policy and delivery pages, and 160 articles accumulated over eleven years, roughly half of them seasonal planting advice. Prices change every spring. Two product lines were dropped last year and both still have pages.

The plan sets four classes. Policy and delivery pages are reviewed each January. Service and product pages are reviewed each February, ahead of the spring price change, and immediately whenever a line is dropped. Seasonal advice is reviewed in the month before its season, which spreads eighty articles across the year rather than piling them into one week. Everything else is reviewed every two years. The retirement test retires eleven articles about equipment no longer sold, and the merge test turns nine overlapping pieces on soil preparation into three. The register has 210 rows and next year the work is already booked.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. How old the site is, what changes on a rhythm in your business, and who would do the reviewing. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before anything starts, based on the number of pages and whether an inventory already exists.
3. Sorting. Every page assigned to a class and given a next-review date. Three to six working days for a site under 300 pages, and considerably faster if an audit has already been done.
4. The tests. The merge and retirement questions drafted and argued out with you before they are applied, because they will retire pages somebody is fond of.
5. The plan, the register and the session. Delivered together, with the first month walked through live. Two to three weeks from the first call.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call and set in writing before anything begins, because the work scales with the number of pages and how many classes they fall into. It does not change afterwards without your agreement. The pricing page shows the four ways I work, including the fixed-price audit that often comes first.

What happens next

The plan produces work, and the first round is usually the largest. Many people hand the merge and delete list straight to the pruning and merging work, and the refresh list to whoever writes for them. If the schedule needs someone to actually run it each month, that is an ongoing maintenance arrangement. And the plan needs owners against the dates, which is the ownership register if you do not yet have one. None of that is assumed. The plan is finished and usable on the day it is delivered.