Editorial
The Gist
- Your website loses value the moment it launches. Without ongoing maintenance, content quality, integrity and compliance begin to erode—quietly undermining conversions and trust.
- Content upkeep is a commercial issue, not housekeeping. Out-of-date pages, broken links and unstructured content damage brand credibility, SEO performance and risk posture.
- Systematic maintenance protects revenue. Organizations need ongoing monitoring, judgment and action—supported by AI—to preserve the long-term value of their digital properties.
Websites depreciate in value from the day after they get launched because digital marketing teams fail to carry out ongoing content maintenance. Could digital agencies step in to offer content maintenance as part of a support package to maintain website value?
For as long as I’ve been in the digital experience world — and that’s a very long time indeed — I’ve always encountered digital teams who wish their website was in a better state. They say, “If only the website is as good as it was when we first launched it” and express the associated regret: “We never had enough time to keep on top of everything.”
While this sentiment often focuses on the frustration of teams, fundamentally it is about the loss of value of a website that is rarely quantified or owned.
When a website launches, arguably its value is at its peak. But then many web teams fail to maintain the value of a website nd undermine ROI by not managing content quality, compliance and value on an ongoing and systematic way. The quality of website content is a commercial problem. Out-of-date pages, broken links, 404 messages and more gets in the way of conversions, undermines customer trust, impacts brand visibility and presents a compliance risk.
Organizations can invest hundreds of thousands of dollars on a new website. It’s a significant cost, and websites remain a critical touchpoint with customers. But despite the best of intentions, the first day after a new website launch is also when things start going downhill and website value declines over time. Errors and issues build up as changes to the website are made and new pages are added.
None of this happens overnight; it happens incrementally in the background and usually without a single accountable owner to prevent it.
After a year or so websites can accumulate enough content and structural issues to affect trust, commercial performance and risk exposure, and even contribute to the build-up of hidden digital estates of out-of-date, expired and forgotten content.
Table of Contents
- Agencies and the Post-Launch Silence
- What Is Content Maintenance?
- Websites and the Loss of Value
- An Opportunity for Digital Agencies
- Communication and Clarity Are the Key
Agencies and the Post-Launch Silence
I’ve also met many digital agencies over the years who feel that they could have done more to sell additional services to existing clients beyond the “big website project."
A common scenario is for a digital agency to produce a brand-new shiny website that is well received by the client and performs well. The agency expects some follow-on work. But instead, the agency encounters a “post-launch silence” where nothing is forthcoming and expected opportunities never quite materialize. Over the years, missing these opportunities present a significant loss of potential revenue.
Of course, you can probably see where I’m going with this. Website teams have a need to protect and expand the value of their website investment. There is an excellent opportunity for digital agencies to provide ongoing content maintenance services that can fulfill that need. Websites maintain their value, digital agencies get more work, organizations reduce their risk and site visitors get a better digital customer experience. Everyone is happy.
What Is Content Maintenance?
One of the reasons why content maintenance is routinely deprioritized by digital teams is that it is regarded as an administrative task rather than a commercial issue.
Content maintenance is sometimes dismissed as “housekeeping”. However, that term completely underestimates the commercial impact and risk associated with poor content management. When content is outdated, inconsistent or unstructured, it can impact SEO, GEO and — critically — how customers perceive your brand.
Content maintenance is better defined as the discipline of protecting revenue, reducing exposure and preserving brand credibility across digital assets. It involves essential ongoing monitoring and checks and then resulting actions that must be carried out on an ongoing basis in order to preserve website value. Of course, that involves some grunge work around content lifecycle management, but increasingly that can be automated thanks to AI. But successful content maintenance also requires some perspective, knowledge and decision-making.
Websites and the Loss of Value
Content maintenance does have some overlap with website optimization, but that is more about making specific improvements; content maintenance is more about preventing the loss of value across multiple areas. In my recent article on proactive web management, I mentioned six core fundamentals of website value:
| Fundamental Area | Details |
|---|---|
| Experience (Value) | Page speed, uptime and transaction flows that directly influence conversions |
| SEO (Value) | Crawlability, indexation health and structured metadata for discoverability |
| Integrity (Value) | Broken-link counts, valid certificates and up-to-date content |
| Accessibility (Risk) | WCAG compliance to open your site to all users and avoid lawsuits |
| Privacy (Risk) | Consent management and data-handling controls that meet GDPR, CCPA and other regulations |
| Environmental Efficiency (Risk) | Hosting and delivery optimizations to reduce carbon footprint |
Content maintenance is required across all these areas of value. All six “fundamentals” can also be effectively monitored using automation, increasingly enhanced by AI. These can range from checks around brand compliance to identifying accessibility issues to fixing broken links to spotting out-of-date content for review in order to decide whether it should be removed or represents a risk.
An Opportunity for Digital Agencies
The idea of ongoing maintenance in the area of performance, technical issues, security and error resolution is a staple for digital agencies who offer support and maintenance contracts, with monitoring tools, SLAs, established routes for reporting and more. There is no reason why this model could not be extended to areas of “content maintenance” work, taking a more holistic approach.
Web teams need help and digital agencies are well-placed to offer services for three key reasons.
Firstly, digital agencies already addressing technical issues often come across content problems that are the root cause of an issue, so may already deal with some content maintenance issues. They routinely have the requisite knowledge and experience to spot persistent issues. They also have the full context of the technical build, experience of the digital marketing team and issues with content contributors. Having this perspective puts digital agencies in a position of strength to offer a more proactive approach to prevent content-related problems and risks before they arise.
Secondly, digital agencies have the specialist knowledge around monitoring that supports effective content maintenance. One of the reasons why successful content maintenance has been difficult for in-house teams is that many of the monitoring and assessment tools are simply too complex and technical.
Take the field of accessibility, an area I know very well. Today there are a number of solutions; digital marketing teams run a tool across their site that invariably reports back via a long report or dashboard listing all the things that to be fixed. Despite what is ostensibly successful monitoring, marketing teams then actually fail to action the recommended changes for a number of reasons, including:
- They don’t have the resources to follow through with the actions.
- They don’t understand the results because they are too technical so can’t turn that into action.
- There is no sense of prioritization, so instead they feel like they have a mountain to climb, which is demotivating, and the action gets shelved.
Digital agencies offering content maintenance can properly understand insights from monitoring, take sensible decisions to prioritise and action the necessary fixes that will have the most benefit.
Finally, the age of generative and agentic AI is changing how website value needs to be managed, and so content maintenance needs to evolve. For example, structured documents are becoming increasingly important to optimize content and reduce risk for the world of LLMs and pre-existing pages also need to have tagging to support generative engine optimization (GEO). This is an area where in-house teams must take ongoing action but do not have the budget, the bandwidth or the knowledge to do so.
Communication and Clarity Are the Key
Content maintenance is a different from technical maintenance. It needs a closer understanding between the digital marketing team and the agency support team in terms of:
- Avoiding bad content management practices and introducing processes that can prevent issues occurring.
- Ensuring any decisions around changing and archiving content are appropriately reviewed by the stakeholder.
- Having absolute clarity on monitoring for areas such as brand governance.
- Working out where humans need to be in the loop in terms of applying AI and automation at scale.
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Like any successful client-agency relationship, strong communication and absolute clarity are at the heart of it all.
Whether content maintenance becomes more prevalent in 2026 remains to be seen, but there is an opportunity there that will benefit digital agencies, digital marketing teams and customers.
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