Maintaining Site Content

You should periodically take these steps to ensure your content is accessible and up-to-date.

Request a link check report

IS&T can check your site for links that no longer work. This usually happens when you link to outside sites you have no control over, and they move or delete content. Since there’s no way to find out when that’s happened, it’s easy to miss broken links until users tell you. It’s easy to keep on top of these links if you ask for a link check report.

Check for outside links in your main/side navigation

You can manually add links to your navigation—but that doesn’t mean you should! In very rare cases, it can make sense to manually add a link to another site in your navigation. But in most cases—especially if you’re linking to a PDF or a page in a separate section of the site—it makes it hard for a user to understand where they are in the site, causing confusion and making your site harder to use. In your WordPress admin, head to Pages > Edit Order and look for the paper clip icon to find manual links. You should never link to a PDF directly from navigation, and in most cases you shouldn’t link to external sites, either. Remove the link and use a button in the content instead.

Check for rogue top-level pages

It’s really easy to quickly add a new page in WordPress and not worry about where it’s going. So, where does it go if you don’t tell it where to go? The page will actually stay at the top level of your site. This can become very messy, very quickly. Avoid this by putting pages in their proper place from the get-go. Then check them now and again and move them where they belong.

The easiest way to check for rogue top-level pages is by going to Pages > Edit Order and seeing what pages show on the first level. Move pages into the site categories that make the most sense. And add the old URL to the Source URLs box on the page, so if someone comes looking for the page, they’ll be redirected to the right spot.

Use posts for news, blogs, and promoting events

It’s tempting to use pages for everything. But for news, blogposts, or event promotion, it makes more sense to use posts. Posts offer the benefits of automatic archiving and timestamps, so site visitors know whether the information is still current. And if your theme supports related content—or you want to support related content in the future—everything is set up correctly already. In short, if something you want to add to the site is related to a specific date or time, or if it’s a news- or blog-like article, posts are the way to go.