Keeping government website content up to date: build a currency system, not another audit

Keeping government website content up to date is not an audit problem. It is a system problem.

An audit tells you the state of your content on one day. It does nothing about the second day.

Most agencies run a content audit, fix the worst of what it finds, then let the content drift again. Six months on it is stale, and someone is already scoping the next audit. The clean-up repeats because nobody set a review trigger, named an owner, or wired a review date into the CMS when the page went live.

This guide is for content leads and digital teams in Australian government who keep being asked to "do another audit" and want to stop paying for the same fix twice. It sets out the system: cadence, ownership, review triggers, and a retire-by-default rule.

Why keeping government website content up to date is a system, not an event

Content currency is the practice of keeping published content accurate, findable, and compliant as business-as-usual, not as a periodic project. The audit is the event. Currency is the system that means you need the event far less often.

Before you start

You need three things: a rough content inventory, access to your CMS publishing settings, and the authority to assign owners. If you cannot assign owners, start there. Currency without accountability is just a tidier spreadsheet.

Step 1: Set a review cadence by content type

Not all content ages at the same rate, so a single "review everything once a year" rule wastes effort on stable pages and lets fast-moving ones rot.

Sort your content into four types and set a cadence for each:

• Transactional (forms, how to apply, fees): review every three to six months, and on any policy or price change.

• News and time-bound (media releases, campaigns, events): set an expiry date at publish. It comes down or gets archived on that date.

• Evergreen (service explainers, eligibility): review every 12 months.

• Statutory (legislated content, formal notices): review on the legislative cycle, and tie the review to the team that owns the obligation.

Stale transactional content is the kind that sends someone to the wrong office or quotes last year's fee. That is an operational and accessibility risk, not a tidiness issue.

Step 2: Name an owner for every page

Every page needs one accountable owner, defined as a role rather than a named person who may have since changed jobs. "The web team" is not an owner. The web team publishes. The business area owns whether the content is true.

Content rots in the gap between who publishes a page and who knows whether it is still correct. Naming an owner closes that gap. When the review date arrives, the system already knows whose task it is.

Step 3: Set the review date at publish time

The single highest-leverage change is to make a review date mandatory before anything goes live. Most content management systems support a review or expiry field. If yours does, make it required. If it does not, hold the dates in a maintenance register keyed to the URL.

A review date set at creation turns currency from a memory problem into a scheduled one. You stop relying on someone noticing that a page is old. The system surfaces it for you.

Step 4: Make retirement the default

For every review, the first question is not "how do we update this?" It is "does this page still earn its place?" Set a retire-by-default rule: if no owner defends the page at review, it comes down.

In the ACT Government consolidation I led, we cut content volume by 90%. That reduction only held because retiring content became routine, not exceptional. Without a rule that removes content, volume creeps back and the next audit finds the same bloat.

Every page you keep is a page someone has to maintain, and every extra page dilutes the ones people actually need. Less content, reviewed more often, beats more content reviewed never.

Step 5: Wire in the triggers you cannot schedule

Cadence handles predictable ageing. Triggers handle the rest. Build a short list of events that force an out-of-cycle review:

• a change to legislation, policy, or fees

• a machinery-of-government change or a renamed agency

• a spike in search or contact-centre queries about a page

• a broken link or a failed-form report

Most damaging staleness is event-driven, not calendar-driven. A fee changes on 1 July and the page still shows last year's number. A trigger list catches what a schedule cannot.

Step 6: Report on currency, not just volume

Measure the health of the system, not the size of the site. Track the share of pages past their review date, the number retired versus published each quarter, and the age of your oldest live transactional page.

If the only number you report is how much content you produced, you are rewarding the behaviour that created the problem. Currency metrics make the hidden cost of stale content visible to the people who fund the work.

What good looks like

You stop scoping audits as projects. A review date exists on every page before it publishes. Owners get scheduled tasks instead of surprise clean-ups. Retirement is normal. The content-quality figure your executive sees is the share of the site that is current, and it stays high without a heroic annual effort.

If your only mechanism for content quality is a periodic audit, you do not have governance. You have a plan. The difference is whether anything happens on the second day.

Photo by Alexandr Popadin on Unsplash.