Year-in-review checklist for your SGEN site

How to run your annual site review and keep your SGEN site in good shape year over year

Most site problems that feel sudden have been building for months. A page with an outdated phone number. A form that stopped sending notifications in the middle of last year. A blog category full of posts that no one reads and a content type that made sense when the site launched but has been improvised around ever since. These are the kinds of problems that a once-a-year review catches before they become the problems that visitors or search engines catch first.

This guide is a structured annual checklist for your SGEN site. It is organized into four categories: what to audit (the full inventory of what is on your site), what to refresh (content and settings that have drifted from what they should be), what to retire (content and features that are no longer serving anyone), and what to plan (structural or content improvements for the year ahead).

Running through this checklist takes two to four hours for a typical site. You can do it in a single session or split it across a few days. The output is a short action list — specific things to fix, update, or archive — that you work through in the weeks following the review. The review itself is mostly reading and noting; the actual work happens after.

Acme Coffee Roasters runs this checklist every January. Their marketing manager, Sarah, blocks a half-day for the review and uses a shared notes document to track what she finds. By the end of January she has a clean site, an action list of six to ten specific improvements, and a content calendar that accounts for the year's planned campaigns and seasonal releases.

What is this for?

This guide is for any SGEN admin who wants to maintain their site deliberately rather than reactively. It is for admins who have been running a site for at least six months and want to take stock of what is working, what has drifted, and what should be cleaned up before the next year of content and campaigns starts.

It is also useful for any admin who has recently taken over a site that someone else built or managed. A year-in-review checklist run on a site you have just inherited gives you a baseline understanding of the site's current state and surfaces anything that needs immediate attention.

The checklist applies to all SGEN sites regardless of size. A ten-page site with a small blog benefits from this review as much as a fifty-page site with hundreds of posts. The scope of what you find will be different, but the process and the categories are the same.

Good use cases

The year-in-review is worth running in any of the following situations. Every example is from Acme Coffee Roasters or one of its sister brands.

What NOT to use this for

The year-in-review is a structured review and action-planning session. It is not the right tool for several adjacent tasks.

How this connects to other features

The year-in-review touches almost every area of your SGEN dashboard. Here is what you will be checking in each area.

Before you start

A few things to prepare before you begin the review session.

Block at least two hours on your calendar. A rushed review misses things. If the site is large (more than thirty pages and a hundred blog posts), block three or four hours or plan to split the review across two sessions.

Open a notes document — Google Docs, Notion, a plain text file, whatever you use. You will be noting findings as you go. "Campaign landing page from spring 2025 — archive or keep?", "Privacy policy last updated August 2024 — update before end of Q1," "Wholesale form notification email needs updating." The notes are your output. Work through them in the weeks after the review.

Have your analytics data available if you can access it. Knowing which pages and posts get the most traffic is useful context for the review. A page with high traffic is a priority to refresh; a page with zero traffic for six months is a candidate for archiving or redirection.

Confirm you have administrator access to the dashboard for the review session. Some areas — Settings, user management, Custom Object types — require admin access to view.

Where to go

The review moves through the dashboard systematically. Start at Pages in the left sidebar, then move to Blog, then Forms, then Media, then Custom Objects, then Settings, then the user list. Moving in this order ensures you cover every area without backtracking.

Steps — Run the annual site review

Work through each step in order. Note findings as you go. Do not make changes during the review unless something is clearly broken and needs immediate attention — save the changes for after the review is complete.

1. Audit every published and draft page

Open Pages in the left sidebar. Switch to the All Pages view. Work through the full list from top to bottom. For each page, note:

• Is the content current? (Not outdated pricing, not expired campaign content, not a phone number that changed last year.)
• Is the SEO Title and Meta Description set? (Open each page and check the SEO panel in the sidebar.)
• Was this page last updated more than twelve months ago? If so, does it need a content review?
• Is this a campaign page from a previous year that is no longer receiving traffic and should be archived or redirected?
• Is this a draft page that has been sitting unfinished? Decide: finish and publish it, or trash it.

For Acme Coffee Roasters, the annual page audit typically turns up two or three campaign pages from the previous year that are still published but no longer linked from anywhere, and one or two pages where the contact details or pricing has changed.

2. Review blog categories and draft posts

Go to Blog in the left sidebar. First, check Categories (usually a sub-item of Blog in the sidebar). Look for:

• Categories with fewer than three posts — these may not be worth maintaining as separate categories. Consider merging them into a more active category.
• Categories with no posts in the last twelve months — are you planning to publish in this category again? If not, retire the category.
• An Uncategorized count above zero — any uncategorized post is an oversight. Assign those posts to the appropriate category.

Then look at your Draft posts. Every draft that has been sitting for more than three months is a decision to make: finish and publish it, or discard it. Acme Coffee's annual review typically reveals three or four unfinished drafts from the previous year — usually event recaps that were started but never finished after the event ended.

3. Check every form for a functioning notification address

Go to Forms in the left sidebar. Open every published form and check the Mail Settings — specifically the

To field. Confirm that:

• The To field is not blank.
• The email address in the To field is still valid — the person or alias it sends to still exists and is checked.
• The From address is still a valid sender address.

Then test each form by submitting it from a private browser window. Confirm the notification email arrives within a few minutes. A form that appears to work for visitors but does not send notifications is a silent lead loss. This is the single most impactful check in the annual review.

4. Review the Media library for outdated or unused assets

Go to Media in the left sidebar. This step is not about deleting everything you are not sure about — it is about identifying assets that are clearly outdated. Look for:

• Images that reference old branding (old logos, old product photography, old campaign graphics with last year's dates).
• Low-resolution images on high-visibility pages. If your homepage hero image is under 1,000 pixels wide, it should be replaced with a higher-resolution version.
• Media that was uploaded for a campaign and is no longer in use. Note the filename — do not delete without confirming the asset is not referenced anywhere on the site.

Do not delete media files during the review session unless you are certain they are unused. Deleted media files that are still referenced on published pages produce broken image errors on the public site. Note candidates for deletion and confirm they are safe to remove after the review.

5. Review Custom Object records for accuracy

If your site uses Custom Objects — team members, products, case studies, testimonials — go to Custom Objects and review each type.

For team members: are all records current? If someone has left the company, their record should be unpublished or updated to reflect their departure. If someone joined since the last review, their record should be added.

For products or catalog items: are all published records still available and accurately described? Discontinued products should be unpublished. Products with seasonal availability should have their status updated.

For testimonials or case studies: are the clients or customers still willing to be cited? Client relationships change. A testimonial from a client who parted ways unhappily is a liability. Review and update as needed.

6. Check Settings, SEO defaults, and user access

Go to Settings in the left sidebar. Check:

• Site name and description — still accurate?
• SEO defaults — the default title and meta description used on pages that do not have their own SEO fields set. Are they current?
• Domain settings — is the canonical domain correct? If the site moved to a new domain during the year, the old domain references in settings should be updated.

Then go to the Users section (typically under Settings or accessible from a separate sidebar item). Review the user list. Remove or deactivate access for anyone who has left the organization or who no longer needs dashboard access. Former employees with active admin access are a security risk. This check is worth doing quarterly, but the annual review is a reliable moment to catch any that were missed.

7. Build your action list and plan for the year ahead

After working through all six areas above, you will have a notes document full of observations. Now organize those observations into an action list.

Group actions by urgency: fix now (broken forms, wrong contact details, former employee access), fix soon (stale campaign pages, uncategorized posts, outdated product records), and plan for later (content categories to invest in, new Custom Object types to build, SEO improvements to make).

Then look at the year ahead. What campaigns are planned? What new products or services will the site need to reflect? Are there new team members who need accounts? Is a site redesign planned? Each of these is a line in your planning notes — not necessarily an action today, but a known event to prepare for.

Acme Coffee's post-review action list typically has eight to twelve items: two or three things to fix immediately, four or five things to update over the next month, and two or three things to plan for but not act on yet. That scope is manageable and gets worked through without rushing.

What success looks like

What to do if it does not work