Why content governance matters more than it looks

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Content governance is easy to treat as a detail, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of attention.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Why it matters

Someone must own each page or it rots. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Set review dates when content is published. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Where it usually goes wrong

Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

How to tell if yours is fine

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about content governance before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.