Year-end content refresh checklist: one hour, five pages, no guesswork.

Most small sites carry dozens of small, dated facts: a footer line, an “updated” stamp, a gift guide that names a year, a sentence that begins “this winter”. None of them fails loudly. They simply start to read as if nobody has looked at the page in a while, and a visitor who sees 2025 in a heading in 2027 draws that conclusion quickly.

Between 26 December and 10 January the orders slow, the inbox is quiet and every page is about to be read by people planning the year ahead. One focused hour now removes the signs of neglect before they are noticed. This checklist is the routine, and the worked example below shows it on a five-page shop.

Start with the pages that change with the calendar: the home page, offers, delivery and returns, opening hours, any gift or seasonal guide, the About page and the footer that repeats on every page. A small shop usually has five to ten. Write the list down before you open anything, so the hour has an end.

Copy the visible text of each page into a plain text file, one file per page. If your pages share a footer, copy it once; it is the single most repeated stale year on most sites.

Paste the pages into the outdated year finder, set the current year and press the button. It lists every year from 2000 to 2035 with its line number and 60 characters of context, and it counts them for each page. Reading the list is faster and safer than searching by eye, because it also catches the year hiding in a long footer or a heading you stopped seeing.

Some numbers look like years and are not: a price of 2026.50, a phone number ending 2026, a code such as 12026. The tool leaves those out, and it lists a year inside a web address apart from the ones in your sentences. Ranges such as 2025-2026 or 2025/26 are read against their last year, so a season that ended in 2026 is old in 2027.¹

1 Documentation: sitemaps overview

Every year mention belongs in one of four piles. The pile decides the action, and only one of them is a simple swap.

History is the pile people forget. A line such as “opened in 2019” is true for ever and should be left alone. The aim is not to remove years; it is to remove the ones that make a page look unattended.

A copyright line is the easy win. Set the last year to the current one, or write the line without a year. A dated stamp such as “updated in 2025” is different: changing it to 2027 says you have checked the page, so check it first. Read the prices, hours and policies on the page, correct what has moved, and only then change the stamp.

If you cannot check a page this week, leave its honest date alone and add it to the January list. An accurate old date is better than a false fresh one.

“This year”, “last season” and “next winter” are correct on the day they are written and wrong a few months later. Type the phrases you use into the tool and it lists every hit with its line. For each one you have two choices: name the year, so the sentence stays true, or reword it so that it needs no year at all.

Naming the year is right when the sentence is a record, such as “our 2026 delivery cut-offs”. Rewording is right when the sentence is a promise, such as “seasonal flavours return every autumn”.

The visible text is only half the job. Your sitemap carries a last-modified date for each page, and it should change only when the page did. The sitemap XML checker reads a sitemap and shows dates and addresses that need attention.²

2 Documentation: sitemaps overview

If you publish holiday opening hours in structured data, update the dates there too; the LocalBusiness schema generator builds the block for you. And if the season has ended for a page, the seasonal page retirement planner helps decide whether to refresh, archive, redirect or remove it.

Fernhill Candle Co. is a one-room workshop with five pages: Home, Gift guide, Delivery, About and Winter offers. The owner pastes all five into the finder on 28 December, sets the current year to 2027 and adds seven phrases: this year, last year, next year, this season, last season, this winter and so far this year. The five-page shop example in the tool loads exactly this text, so you can run it yourself.

The finder reports 20 year mentions, 17 of them older than 2027. Three more sit inside addresses, such as a link to /blog/2024-gift-ideas/ and a photo called team-2023.jpg; they are listed and not counted. Five old years are in titles and headings, seven lines are stale stamps, copyright lines or dated labels, and six phrases need a decision. The checklist it produces has 25 items.

• Minutes 0 to 10. List the pages and copy their text.
• Minutes 10 to 20. Paste, set the year, run the finder, export the CSV.
• Minutes 20 to 40. Footers and stamps: fix the safe ones, queue the rest.
• Minutes 40 to 50. Relative phrases: name the year or reword.
• Minutes 50 to 60. Sitemap dates, opening hours, then run the finder again to confirm the list is shorter.