Maintaining your 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 broken links or links that no longer work properly. This usually happens when you link to outside sites that you have no control over, and they move or delete content. Since they don’t have a way of letting you know that happened, it’s easy to miss broken links until your users tell you they’re broken. 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. The best way to avoid this is to always put pages in the most appropriate place for them to live in the first place – and the next best thing is to check for them and move them where they belong every so often.

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 these pages into the main categories of the site that make the most sense, and add the old URL to the Source URLs box on the page so that if someone comes back to look at that page, they will be redirected to the right place.

Use posts for news, blogs, and promoting events

It can be tempting to use pages for everything – but in the case of your news, blog, or promoting an event, it makes more sense to use a post. Posts give you the benefit of automatic archiving, a timestamp so people visiting your site know if the information is still current, and if your theme supports related content – or you want to support related content in the future – everything is already set up correctly. 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 best choice for your content.