Maintaining Your Web Area

If you wait to receive a "EPA Content Needs Review" email before making updates, your content and the people who need it may already be suffering. Performing a few monthly maintenance activities keeps content fresh and easier for your audience to find and use. Regular maintenance will:

  • improve customer satisfaction, 
  • enhance perceptions of EPA's credibility, and
  • greatly reduce the number of emails you receive from drupal_admin!
On This Page:

Initial Actions, Soon After You Publish or Inherit a Web Area

Actions for Every Month

  • Check your Siteimprove, Web site quality assurance report
    • Start with the QA report for broken links and spelling reports, the accessibility report and readability report.
    • Keep in mind that epa.gov links with a 403 error code usually indicate the page has been unpublished, which, to the public, is just as broken as a 404!
    • Also note that sometimes redirected links might just go to a "content has been moved" kind of page or to a home page, so check those as well.
  • Check for expiring content using your web area's Published Content tab. Sort your content by the review deadline column to see when pages will expire. 
    screenshot of published content view in the WebCMS
     
  • Try to get your pages to show up in EPA.gov search results, and update any page titles or descriptions that look poor in those results.
  • Use some basic Google Analytics reports, especially the Google Analytics Dashboard for a Web Area, to learn about usage of your pages and PDFs: setting up those two reports to be emailed to you every month is most important.
    • Make sure your most-viewed resources are in good shape and up to date.
    • Also take a look what isn't being used very much. Try getting those to show up in search results. You may find that the reason your pageviews (or PDF clicks) are low is that your content is very similar to another result. Reducing duplication is better for your analytics, for search results, for your users’ needs, and for our credibility! So look for opportunities to interlink rather than duplicate, especially with PDFs (see Linking to EPA Publications in the National Service Center for Environmental Publications (NSCEP)).

Actions for When You Have Time, but at Least Quarterly

  • Check the numbers for your web area and its homepage on the Web Area Metrics Scorecard, which displays: and compares those numbers with the same data for:
    • your home page's bounce rate,
    • the pages per session for your web area, and
    • the average session duration for your web area, 
    • all the web areas in your office or Region, 
    • all EPA web areas, and
    • EPA-wide goals for these metrics.
  • Look at Secondary Checks in your Siteimprove reports.
    • These include Readability:
      • Note that this check focuses especially on the length of words, sentences, and paragraphs. Breaking up content into sections (with appropriate headings) and bullets as much as possible can be applied even to technical content where shorter words are not possible.
      • Follow best practices for writing.
  • Redundant, Outdated, and/or Trivial Content (ROT): Review and Clean Up Your Web Area: this should definitely be part of your response to the "EPA Content Needs Review" email, but if you have time to do it more often you'll have less content to maintain.
  • Getting Started: How Web Analytics Facilitate Site Maintenance can point you to other items of regular maintenance.

At Least Annually

  • Make sure all of your links to non-EPA webpages still go to current and appropriate content. This means actually clicking those links and looking at the content. Be sure you are following Procedure: External Site Links.

Retiring/Unpublishing Content

Web Guide

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Contact the Web Guide to ask a question, provide feedback, or report a problem.
Last updated on May 3, 2024