Web Maintenance Procedures

Stick to a schedule to keep your webpages updated. Not only will this keep your pages relevant, but regular maintenance will help establish trust with your readers. Your scheduled maintenance should get rid of ROT and delete outdated documents from the Media Library.

Set Dates to Check Your Site

Scheduling time on your calendar for regular web maintenance will help you remember when to update content that’s subject to being outdated. Time-sensitive material should be updated frequently, monthly, or annually – depending on its subject matter.

Maintenance Examples

Get Rid of ROT

Redundant, outdated, and trivial content (ROT) is a real problem for many web content creators. Without keeping close track of our pages, our websites can grow out of control with information that is no longer or has never been useful to our readers.

One way to get control of a website with multiple pages is by conducting a site audit and using it as a tool to identify pages that should be deleted.

Redundant

Content is redundant when multiple pages communicate the same thing. The great thing about the web is that you don’t need to duplicate content that is available somewhere else. Instead, you can just link to it. Redundant content confuses web visitors and creates unnecessary clutter.

Outdated Content

I you are using future tense language to talk about something that’s already happened, then you have outdated content.

Here are some other types of outdated content:

• You have faculty/staff bios for people who no longer work in your department
• You move your office, but don’t update your room number on the web
• Your web content talks about your “new offices,” but you moved 3 years ago

Instead of creating new replacement pages with updated content, try updating your existing pages with the latest information instead. Otherwise, the old page may still show up in search results and your visitors will get confused. If you can’t update it, just get rid of it.

If you have information about an annual event and you don’t want to recreate the page every year, just unlink it and keep the page. You could add a note saying that the page will be updated for next year’s event as information becomes available. This will help avoid confusion if someone finds the page through search.

Trivial Content

Trivial content is probably the hardest to identify. Generally, it is any content that is insignificant to your visitors or unrelated to your website’s purpose.

It may help to rate this on a scale of 1-5, with “5” being vitally important and “1” being completely irrelevant. Anything with a 1-2 should be cut, a 5 should stay, and 3-4’s may require further thought. Some information may be nice to have, but not essential. Does that make it trivial? Remember to keep your audience in mind when evaluating for trivial content. Tailor your content to their needs and trim away anything that doesn’t help them accomplish what you want them to do.

For more information on conducting an audit of your site and getting rid of ROT contact our Web Content Team.

Delete Old Documents

Did you know that any document (Word, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, etc.) you upload into your Media Library is searchable? Therefore, even if you aren’t actively linking to that document on any webpage, it will still show up when someone searches our website or on outside search engines.

So, do a little spring cleaning.

Please delete all old documents out of your Media Library. If you want to keep some of these documents, save them to your computer and delete them out of the WordPress Media Library. The Library is not a storage area; only documents actively in use on the website should be there.

Be carful not to delete files in use on your site. WordPress does not notify you what files are and are not being used. Deleting a file that is in use on your site will result in missing images and broken links leading to error pages.

If you need help finding out if a document or image is being used on your site, contact us at the Web Content Team (webcontent@liberty.edu). We can use our find and replace tool to search your site for a specific file and let you know what pages may contain links to it. We can also help delete files from your media library if you need assistance.

Keep Your Media Library Timely with File Replacement

Instead of uploading a new file each time a document is updated, replace the old file with the latest version using the file replacement tool. Replacing the file keeps the same file name and URL, meaning you will not have to find and update all links pointing to the file.This also cuts down on the number of outdated files collecting in your Media Library.