Why you should automate the unpublishing of outdated content

Keeping content up to date is key to maintaining a credible presence online, but it can be a pain to manually track what needs to be unpublished and when. For many organizations, especially those in highly regulated industries, the process of what’s called content expiration is a powerful way to make sure that outdated content is removed automatically, before it causes any issues. 

Here, we’ll introduce the concept of content expiration and some reasons why it’s so important to get right. Then, we’ll share some tips on how to get started with a strategy that’s efficient and successful, including using tools like Kontent.ai to make the process as painless as possible.

What is content expiration? And when should it happen?

Content expiration is the act of automatically removing, replacing, or archiving digital content after a certain period of time or under specific conditions. Think about things like seasonal promotions, time-limited campaigns, or special offers that are only valid “for a limited time only” or “until midnight on the 31st!” 

While promotions and campaigns may be the easiest examples to digest, conditions for content expiration may differ depending on your industry, organization, audiences, products, and the content you create. Let’s check out four common conditions.

• Time-based expiration: Content should expire after a specific period or on a predetermined date. This is usually the condition for things like promotions, limited-time offers, or seasonal content that’s no longer relevant after a particular period or date.
• Event-based expiration: Content should expire when a related event occurs, such as the ending of a project, product launch, or campaign. For example, an announcement may expire once the event it promotes is over.
• “If/then” dependency expiration: Content should expire only if a dependent action occurs, such as updates to policies or associated documents, product discontinuations, or stockouts. This ensures that only the most recent information is available.
• Performance-based expiration: Content should expire based on specific engagement metrics, such as low traffic or a decline in interactions. If content fails to meet KPIs, it may be removed or revised.

Manually unpublishing high volumes of content regularly can be tough, time-consuming, and even risky. That’s why content expiration dates are a useful tool for organizations who deal with specific conditions often.

Why certain content needs an expiration date

There are many valid reasons why a company would want to unpublish content and to be able to do so automatically rather than manually. Here are some that we find particularly important.

Maintaining content relevancy and accuracy

Outdated content is more than just old; it may also be inaccurate or misleading. An expiration date ensures that only relevant, up-to-date content is available to users. This reduces the risk of misinformation, which is especially important in industries like technology, where change is constant. Consider, for example, the complications that can arise from outdated how-to tutorials. Removing or updating documentation within a specific time frame or release cycle prevents users from following guidance that’s simply no longer true. 

Ensuring brand consistency

A brand is how your organization shows up in the world. That’s why your public-facing content should align with your current image and messaging. Expired campaigns, promotions, or mixed branding materials can create confusion and disappointment. With expiration dates automatically baked into your launch plans, you’ll be more confident that legacy content won’t be in conflict with your current brand identity.

Prioritizing cost efficiency

Content storage requires both digital space and associated management costs, which can be significant if your content repository continues to grow. Expiring outdated content helps prevent data bloat, enabling companies to optimize their storage infrastructure, reduce operational costs, and allocate resources more efficiently. All without the time sink that comes with regular, large-scale audits.

Complying with laws and regulations

In highly regulated industries especially, it’s often required to have content accessible for a specified period of time. Consider financial services, healthcare, insurance, and legal sectors, for example. They often have strict data retention policies mandating the removal of outdated records. Setting expiration dates helps companies reduce the risk of non-compliance and mitigate potential fines or other negative consequences, without putting all of that pressure on a single responsible person or team.

Meeting security and privacy standards

Content that contains sensitive information, like personal data or proprietary details, can pose a security risk. Similarly to the previous reason, automatically expiring content helps lessen the risks associated with unauthorized access to outdated but still sensitive information. Expiring content containing confidential data after a set period minimizes data exposure and reduces the potential impact of data breaches.

Getting started with automated content expiration

Retiring old content has huge benefits, but it may be difficult to carry out consistently without the right strategy, backed by the technologies you use every day. To help you get started, we’ve put together some best practices and considerations so that you can implement the best approach to automation to expire your content as needed. 

Determine your most common content expiration conditions

First things first: Awareness is key. Do you know what content needs to be expired in your organization? Identify why content expiration is necessary for your business, for example, outdated information, compliance requirements, or seasonal promotion, and what conditions you’ll come up against regularly enough to automate.

Once you’ve determined your conditions, classify your content that needs expiration and outline its lifecycle. Make sure to confirm that the content expiration policies you set up also comply with your specific laws on data retention. 

With your conditions and classifications mapped, double-check and review the impact that expired content may have on the rest of your content before you execute your expiration schedule.

Prepare for redirects, errors, and impacts on SEO

Having a solid plan in place when content expires also includes the nitty-gritty details, like preparing for redirects, errors, and impacts on SEO. Set up 301 redirects to maintain a smooth customer journey and preserve your SEO rankings. A 301 is a permanent redirect from one URL to another; all users that request an old URL will be automatically sent to the new one. If you have to remove content without a redirect, use custom error pages to avoid leaving users frustrated and confused. 

Also be prepared to take care of inbound links pointing to expired content to prevent broken links and the SEO hit that comes with them. Finally, don’t forget to keep your XML sitemaps tidy by regularly removing references to pages that are no longer live.

Make sure the customer experience is not disrupted

Having up-to-date content is an important aspect a positive customer experience, so make sure the expiration process keeps customers in mind too. Let users know when content is no longer available or has been replaced, so they’re not caught off guard. Where possible, offer alternative or updated resources to keep their experience smooth and helpful. 

Over-communicating high-impact changes is often better than under-communicating them. Be as transparent as possible to minimize confusion and negative reactions. 

Pay attention to how users react to the changes, too. Collect feedback and observe behavior. Should you have refreshed a blog rather than retire it? Lesson learned. Use these insights to tweak and improve your approach over time.

Schedule your expiration dates and their alerts

Once you’ve set your conditions, classified your content, and factored in all the implications of retired content, put your content expiration plan in motion. Start by setting predefined timelines with specific expiration dates tailored to the type of content. Be sure to take advantage of automated scheduling tools to truly get the benefits. We’ll talk about how we do it at Kontent.ai later in the blog. 

To ensure that content expiration goes smoothly, we recommend setting up pre-expiration alerts to keep content owners in the loop. If it’s relevant, notify users about any changes ahead of time. 

Audit and archive your content regularly

Auditing your content regularly is just good practice. Take the time and use data to review which pieces need to be expired, updated, or archived. Expire content securely and archive it properly so you have it on hand for compliance or just in case you need to restore it later.

For some content, a straightforward refresh might be the right call. Look for ways to repurpose expired content into new formats or campaigns to get more mileage out of your efforts. 

Using your content management system for efficient content expiration

If you’re managing most of your content in a content management system (CMS), then make sure it supports the auditing and automated expiration of content, usually handled with expiration dates, tags, or metadata that trigger automated actions. Let’s check out some features that make content expiration efficient in Kontent.ai, the CMS that’s designed for complex content requirements.

How to schedule content expiration

Automation can handle the archiving, deletion, or updating of content once it reaches its expiration point. This reduces manual tasks and simplifies content management, especially for organizations managing large volumes of digital content. In Kontent.ai, users can schedule the publish and unpublish dates of content at the same time, right from the authoring experience or via API. Need to make any changes? You can do that too. 

We always ensure the experience of the CMS is positive for business and IT users. This update benefits both content teams and development teams, making the process of automatically expiring content much easier. Check out what one of our product managers has to say.

How to use taxonomies for bulk unscheduling

Companies use taxonomies to categorize and tag their content, linking it to specific products, services, or features. These tags can range from broad categories to detailed terms and relationships. 

One way to use taxonomies is to tag content related to specific campaigns (Singles Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday) or time-sensitive topics (music festivals, conferences, trending news stories). This way, you can easily filter and manage this specific content in bulk for expiration. This approach also streamlines scheduling, archiving, and other bulk actions needed for content expiration workflows.

You can bulk schedule the unpublishing of your content items in Content & assets. First, select the content items for unpublishing carefully. Then, click the menu and select Unpublish and archive to schedule your unpublishing. Et voilà!

How to use metadata to describe content expiration conditions 

To describe content expiration conditions in your metadata, you can add a custom tag or field that indicates the expiration date, like expires or expiryDate. Include details such as the status after expiration (e.g., archived, deleted) so it’s clear what will happen when the date passes. 

Make sure this metadata is consistently used across your content management system to help automate the process and keep everything organized.

How to archive content

When deciding to unpublish and archive your content item, first consider if other content items link to it. Unpublishing an item that is linked elsewhere can lead to problems, such as broken links. To prevent this, redirect the archived item’s URL to a similar published content item that you can link to. 

On the other hand, deleting an unpublished or archived content item is an irreversible action in Kontent.ai, so consider deletion thoughtfully. Archiving content is usually the preferred option, as it preserves it for record-keeping or compliance purposes. This ensures you have a history of what was published. It also allows for future reference or potential reuse without permanently losing valuable material. 

How to monitor content freshness 

You may find you have content that doesn’t necessarily need to be taken offline at a specific time or according to a specific condition, but could use a refresh in time. Content that stays the same on your website for too long may eventually put your audiences off and damage your credibility. 

In Kontent.ai, you can leverage the insights from the Unchanged published items widget in Mission Control to initiate content audits of potentially outdated content, such as FAQs, trend reports, and latest news. Plainly seeing content that’s remained online completely unchanged, and for how long, may help you prioritize your updates and add fresh ideas to your backlog.

Make content expiration a part of your content management strategy now

Removing outdated content is one way to keep your web presence relevant and compliant. If you don’t currently have automation in place to do so, we recommend you follow our guide to make strides toward an approach that works for your organization. Want to learn more about how a CMS can help automate content expiration and support successful content audits? Schedule a demo with one of our experts.