Content refresh plan

What a content refresh plan is

A content refresh plan is a written schedule of which existing pages get updated, in what order, what needs changing on each one, and how often each comes round again. It is a plan, not the writing. The output is a list with dates against it, short enough that whoever does the updating can work from it without coming back to ask questions.

It keeps pages. That is what separates it from the other two jobs on an ageing site: pruning deletes, consolidation merges several pages into one, and a refresh plan updates a page and leaves it at the same address doing the same job, better.

When you need one

You need one when you have more pages worth updating than you have time to update, which is most businesses past their third year. The plan is the ordering, and the difference between a good refresh programme and a bad one is almost entirely which page gets done first.

The second situation is a trade where facts move. Rates, regulations, thresholds, product ranges, opening arrangements. In those businesses the question is not whether to refresh but how often each type of page needs it, and the plan answers that once instead of every time it comes up.

You do not need a plan for a single page. If you already know the one page that has gone stale, have it updated and skip this; that work sits under outdated page refresh. A plan starts earning its place at about a dozen pages and upward.

What is in the plan

• The order. Every page to be refreshed, ranked. Ranking is done on three things: how close the page sits to a sale, how wrong it currently is, and how little work it needs. The page that is nearly right and nearly selling goes first.
• The brief per page. Two or three lines saying exactly what to change: the figure that is out of date, the section that is missing, the answer buried in paragraph five. Not “update this page”, which is what most refresh lists say and why most of them stall.
• The cycle. How often each page comes round again. A page carrying prices or rules may be quarterly; a guide to something that does not change may be every second year. Each page gets a date, not a category.
• The owner and the effort. Who does each one, and roughly how long it should take, in hours. The hours are what let the plan survive a busy month, because they let somebody choose three pages rather than abandon all thirty.
• The stop rule. The pages that should not be refreshed again, and what to do with them instead. A refresh plan that never retires anything becomes a treadmill.

What you get

The schedule. One spreadsheet: page, rank, what to change, who, hours, next date. Sortable by any of them. It is yours and it is meant to be edited rather than admired.

The first-quarter brief. The top eight or ten pages written up properly, a paragraph each, so that the first three months of work can start without another meeting.

The walkthrough. Forty-five minutes with whoever will actually do the work, going through the ranking and the reasoning behind it, so they can rank the next batch themselves.

A worked example

An illustration. An insurance brokerage in Saskatoon has 78 pages, of which 40 are worth keeping. Nine carry figures that change every year and are currently between one and four years out of date. Fourteen are guides that are still broadly right but were written before the business added commercial lines. The rest are fine as they stand.

The plan puts four pages at the top: the ones that carry a figure and sit beside a quote form, because each is a thirty-minute fix on a page people genuinely use. The remaining five figure pages follow. Then the commercial-lines gap is closed by adding a section to six of the fourteen guides; the other eight are marked as a two-year cycle and left alone. The nine figure pages are given an annual date in the week after the rates change, each with a named owner, so that the brokerage stops discovering in June that its site has been wrong since January.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. How many pages there are, what changes in your trade and when it changes, and who will actually do the updating. No charge.
2. Access. Read-only access to your analytics, the page list, and twenty minutes with whoever fields the questions customers ask.
3. The pass. Four to seven working days for a site under 200 pages. Each candidate page is read, not scored from a dashboard.
4. Delivery. The schedule and the first-quarter brief arrive the day before the walkthrough call, so they are read cold first.

What it costs

Quoted in CAD as a fixed price after the half-hour call, fixed in writing before anything begins, and driven mostly by how many pages have to be read. Where a content audit has already been done the reading is done with it and the plan becomes a much smaller job; the audit's price is published on the pricing page.

What happens next

Most businesses run the first quarter themselves, which is the point of writing the briefs in plain language. Some hand the schedule back to me and have it worked through page by page. Either way the plan usually arrives beside two decisions it cannot make on its own: which pages to delete instead, which is pruning, and which groups to merge, which is consolidation. Longer term the cycle dates belong in a content lifecycle plan so that they apply to new pages too. None of that is assumed. The plan is complete and useful on its own.