Most agencies approach content strategy as an editorial challenge. They list the topics they want to cover, identify gaps, assign owners to sections, and build a publishing calendar. Six months later, the website has more content, more duplication, and the same structural problems it had before.
The gap is not ambition. It is that the strategy only asked what to create, and never asked what to do with what already exists.
The problem with large government websites is volume, not quality
A large government website covering multiple agencies, service streams, and policy areas typically holds thousands of pages. Many are outdated. Some contradict each other. A significant proportion attract almost no traffic.
Before any strategy for new content is useful, that existing mass needs to be understood: what is there, who owns it, what it is supposed to do, and whether it should exist at all.
When I led digital content consolidation across ACT Government directorates, the first substantive task was not writing. It was auditing. We reviewed thousands of pages across dozens of websites, mapped them against user tasks, and asked a simple question about each one: does this content help someone complete a task, or does it exist because someone published it at some point?
Ninety per cent did not survive that question
The ACT Government content consolidation reduced published content by approximately 90 per cent. Average call centre time dropped from 7 to 4 minutes after the consolidated content went live. The improvement was not incidental. Shorter, clearer, better-structured content meant users could complete tasks without calling for help.
That is the return on the deletion decisions. A content strategy that does not include a framework for making those decisions is not a strategy for the website. It is a plan for new content sitting on top of unaddressed problems.
What a real content strategy for a large government website includes
A real content strategy for a large government website requires at least five things that rarely appear in strategy documents.
A content audit mapped to user tasks, not site structure. Most audits describe what exists. A useful one maps existing content against the tasks users are actually trying to complete, and identifies where the website currently fails them. Without this baseline, the strategy is guessing.
A clear answer to the ownership question. Every page on a government website has an implied owner: a team, a business unit, or a policy area. A content strategy for a large organisation has to name the ownership model: who decides what gets published, who approves changes, and who has the authority to remove content. Without this clarity, deletion is practically impossible because no one has the mandate to make it happen.
A default position on duplication. Large government websites are almost always duplicated. The same information appears in multiple places under different headings, written in different registers for different notional audiences. The Australian Government Style Manual addresses content standards directly; the same logic of single-source authority applies to ownership across the site.
A retirement policy alongside the publishing process. Most content management processes have a clear path for creating and approving content. Very few have an equally clear path for retiring it. Without a retirement cycle with a clear trigger, review period, and decision outcome, content accumulates indefinitely and the strategy's work is undone over time.
Someone with the authority to say no. This is the most important and least comfortable requirement. Somewhere in the organisation, someone needs a clear brief to decline content requests that do not serve a user task, do not meet the standard, or duplicate what already exists. Without that authority, the strategy is advisory rather than governing. The DTA Digital Service Standard expects agencies to build governance into delivery; content authority is what makes that possible.
Strategy without deletion authority is just a publishing plan
The practical test for whether a government website has a real content strategy is not the document. It is the last thing that got taken down.
If the organisation cannot point to a recent example of content being retired, redirected, or removed because it no longer served users, the strategy is likely aspirational. Not because of bad intentions, but because no one had the authority to act on it.
Before commissioning new content, it is worth asking: does this organisation have a clear framework for what stays and what goes? If not, the strategy work has not started yet.
Photo by Lauren Sauder on Unsplash