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Website Content Maintenance Best Practices Guide

Routine maintenance by website content teams is required in order to keep torontomu.ca up-to-date and maintain a positive user experience. Lack of proper maintenance can lead to content that is out-of-date, broken, or inaccessible, it directly harms the university's mission and creates significant risks.

This guide outlines a simple, focused strategy designed to be completed in approximately one hour per week, with a monthly maintenance session for a larger review. By consistently following these steps, we can ensure our digital presence is:

  • Trustworthy and Professional: Current, correct information builds user confidence. Old dates, expired documents, and broken links undermine our credibility.
  • Accessible and Compliant: We meet legal and ethical obligations (like AODA) by making content usable by everyone, regardless of ability.
  • Optimized for Search (SEO): Clean, fresh content ranks higher, making it easier for people to find our programs and research. Broken links and outdated pages actively hurt our search ranking.

Site administrators can use our existing tools—Siteimprove, AEM Accessibility Tools, and Looker Studio reports—to identify the highest priority issues so you can focus your time where it matters most.

Requesting access to Looker Studio & Siteimprove

Looker Studio reports can be created to display analytics data for a site. In order to get access please complete the Looker Studio report request form (external link) .

Siteimprove is used to review and maintain site health. In order to get access please complete the Siteimprove access report form

Site administrators should also take advantage of existing support documentation in order to ensure they are aware of how to use AEM and troubleshoot issues that arise.

Overall, smaller, less active sites may need less maintenance while larger sites with many pages, updates and authors will need more frequent and in-depth maintenance.

University Site Maintenance Best Practices 

These practices are constrained to a manageable 60 minutes per week, focusing on high-impact fixes using existing site management tools.

Content creators should always follow best practices when creating or editing pages. These tasks must be done immediately whenever an admin is editing any page.

  • Ensure site content is created with best practices in mind:
  • Link Integrity Check: Test links on the site before publishing
  • QA before publishing:
    • Review the page in ‘view as published mode’
    • Fix all issues and manually review warnings identified by the AEM Accessibility checker 
    • Test the page on desktop and mobile devices
    • Review the pre-launch checklist (created by UR)
  • QA after publishing: verify that the page appears as intended, that all images load properly and that all links function.

A website content editor should be assigned to review and maintain the website weekly. In order to keep the site working well some routine maintenance is required:

  1. Broken Link Sweep (15 Minutes):
    1. Using Siteimprove log in and go directly to the "Broken Links" report filtered to your sub-site(s).
    2. Tackle the Top 5-10 broken links identified on your sites.
  2. QA Review (15 minutes)
    1. Using Siteimprove, review the QA Overview and begin to address the top category in the issues column (apart from broken links, already addressed); this could include reading level, large images, misspelling, etc.
  3. Accessibility Top Fixes (15 Minutes):
    1. Use the AEM Alt Text Dashboard to review all images for alt text.
    2. Using the built in AEM Accessibility checker on every page. Focus on the highest-priority, easiest-to-fix items such as:
      1. Missing Alt Text: Fix the top 5 images missing alt text across your site.
      2. Incorrect Headings: Check pages for proper heading order (H1 then H2s, H3s, etc.).
      3. Non-descript links: Links should be self-describing, avoid “learn more” or “click here”
  4. Outdated Content Triage (15 Minutes):
    1. Using the modified date in AEM Review the 5 oldest pages/documents on your sub-site (based on 'Last Modified Date').
    2. Update the content and 'Last Modified Date,' or unpublish/delete the page if it is no longer relevant.
    3. Delete events that have already taken place

Plan a monthly checkup of the website for clean up and maintenance. This could take half a day or more depending on the size and state of the site. Use the reports tool in AEM to create reports that show the state of your website.

  • Images: Delete old/unused images out of the DAM
  • News & Archive Policy:
    • Review all news items older than 5 years
    • Action: Unless the news story is considered a major institutional milestone with external backlinks, unpublish or delete the item to prevent clutter.
  • Faculty/Staff Directory Check:
    • Review all directories and 'People' pages on the sub-site.
    • Action: Remove any individual who is no longer officially associated with the school (e.g., faculty/staff who have departed).
  • Program/Initiative Review:
    • Identify all sub-pages dedicated to former programs, research initiatives, or groups that are no longer active.
    • Action: These pages must be reviewed for deletion. If they hold historical value, they must be clearly marked as "Archived - Program Ended [Year]" and unlinked from main navigation.
  • Linked Documents Review (PDFs, etc.):
    • Review all static documents linked on your site.
    • Goal: Convert any essential, stable document content directly into an accessible web page instead of linking to a file. Delete or archive outdated files.
  • Unpublished pages and assets: Review and delete unpublished pages and assets (images, pdfs) unless they are being built for an upcoming publication.

If you are unsure of how to make the most of the Siteimprove tools (external link)  please review the guides on the Siteimprove site, or contact University Relations.

Request an unused/unpublished asset report:

Authors can request a report of unpublished & unreferenced assets i.e. files not being used on your site.

Before submitting a request, it is recommended that authors first generate their own asset and page reports in AEM. These reports can be used to identify items that are unpublished, deactivated, or have no publish status (have never been published).

Please note: Assets that are children of the main root path used in an asset list or gallery grid component may not be detected as referenced. For sites that use these components, we estimate the report to be approximately 95% accurate.