Your complete knowledge base maintenance checklist

Are you looking for a knowledge base maintenance checklist to follow for your next routine checkup? Maybe you're getting ready to create your first hub and want to know what to expect. Either way, you're in the right place!

A knowledge base is one of the most valuable resources a company can offer its customers. It allows you to give your customers instant access to helpful information, reduce support requests, and ultimately help create a better user experience.

However, a knowledge base is only as good as its content—outdated, inaccurate, poorly structured articles are far less effective and can lead to frustrated customers.

Regular maintenance can help you avoid this problem and many others often associated with poorly maintained knowledge bases. Keeping your systems updated ensures that customers can always find reliable, relevant information.

In this guide, we'll explore why maintaining your knowledge base matters and provide a complete list of things you'll want to check to make sure your knowledge base is in top shape.

Let's dive in!

Why is knowledge base maintenance important?

An updated knowledge base assists customers, internal teams, and employees by helping them do their jobs more effectively.

With that in mind, here are a few specific reasons why you'll want to make this maintenance checklist a regular part of your quarterly plan:

• Maintains accuracy and relevance - Information within a business, its products, and services are constantly evolving. Regular maintenance ensures that your knowledge base reflects the most up-to-date information. This prevents users from accessing outdated or incorrect information, which can lead to confusion and other problems.
• Improves user experience - It makes sense that a well-maintained knowledge base is easier to navigate and use. This leads to a better user experience, whether your users are customers, employees, or affiliate partners.
• Boosts productivity - For employees, a current and accurate knowledge base reduces the time they otherwise might waste searching for information or asking colleagues for help. For customers, a helpful knowledge base can empower them to resolve issues independently, which reduces the need to contact support.
• Reduces support costs - A practical and well-maintained knowledge base can drastically reduce your daily support tickets. This reduction translates directly into lower operational costs for the business.
• Increases discoverability - Regular maintenance often means adjusting content so search crawlers can easily understand it. By updating articles with relevant keywords, improving site structure, and ensuring content is fresh, businesses can improve the SEO visibility of their data, if they want a public knowledge base. This makes it easier for people to discover valuable information, further amplifying the benefits mentioned above.

Knowledge base maintenance checklist: 10 things you should do

Check for consistent language and branding

Maintaining a valuable, relevant knowledge base begins with reviewing and updating your content to make sure your language and branding are consistent. We suggest checking your company's style guide and making sure all your content lines up with the same brand voice and uses the same language.

It's a good idea to work with your content team and graphic designers so everyone is on the same page in regards to language and branding.

Following this simple step will help you align your knowledge base and set yourself up for success.

Standardize formatting and styles

Style and formatting consistency are crucial for creating a professional and user-friendly knowledge base. Our advice is to make sure all articles adopt the same format using standardized templates for bullet points, headings, and subheadings at the same time that you check for language and branding.

Taking this step not only improves readability but also enhances usability.

Well-organized, succinct content is easier to read, which allows users to find the information they need quickly. As a result, they'll spend less time clogging up your support channels and more time enjoying your products. Here's an example of a clean knowledge base for a popular WordPress plugin:

Image source: Duplicator

Remove or archive outdated articles

As your knowledge base grows, some content will inevitably become obsolete. Instead of allowing outdated articles to remain accessible, it's better to remove or archive them.

You can spot irrelevant content by reviewing product changes, policy updates, and customer usage patterns.

Archiving content is a strategic way of preserving information without causing clutter that might overwhelm users. Certain older pieces of content remain useful as references or to meet compliance; thus, placing them in an easily accessible but non-public area of your knowledge base means they are there when needed.

Redirecting visitors from outdated articles to newer, more appropriate ones is important to ensure a seamless user experience.

When you remove a high-traffic page, it is essential to automatically redirect users to the article that most closely matches their needs.

Optimize for SEO

If you want to use your knowledge base to expand your reach, your best bet is to make sure they’re optimized for search engines. You can do this by finding relevant keywords for your articles and using them when appropriate and relevant. 

But remember: interests, goals, and pain points change over time, and so do keywords. With this in mind, you'll want to be sure that you're using the right words and phrases throughout your knowledge base.

This will help your knowledge base become more visible and make it more convenient for users to find the information they seek.

It’s also important to keep meta descriptions and titles updated, as well as clear, captivating, and informative. Well-written meta descriptions help search engines better understand your content, which is crucial for knowledge base SEO.

Fix broken links

Broken links are usually a major source of frustration for users and can have a negative impact on your SEO rankings.

If you want to avoid this situation, it's an excellent idea to conduct regular link audits so you can identify and fix broken links. A solid linking structure ensures users can easily navigate between related articles without hitting dead ends.

Once broken links are identified, update them with the correct URLs or remove them if they are no longer relevant. Monitoring link health helps maintain a smooth and reliable user experience while ensuring that your knowledge base links continue to work as intended.

Add or update multimedia content

Visual content, such as images, screenshots, and videos, enhance the clarity of knowledge base articles, but they need regular updates to stay relevant (unless you use a screenshot automation tool like LaunchBrightly).

Replacing outdated visuals to match current user interfaces, branding, or product features ensures users see accurate, helpful visuals that match what they're trying to accomplish. This will reduce confusion and help your audience find answers faster.

Videos should be checked to confirm they still load correctly and reflect the latest updates to your products or services. If some of your knowledge base pages are missing videos, consider creating and adding new ones to make them more engaging. 96% of marketers who use video say it has helped their customers better understand their product.

Make accessibility improvements

A truly effective knowledge base is one that is accessible to all users, regardless of preferences or limitations.

You can do many different things here, including adding descriptive alt text to images, including closed captions on videos, and adding colorblind mode to your knowledge base.

Incorporate user feedback

Incorporating user feedback can be one of the best ways to refine your knowledge base. It's a good idea to use ratings, comments, and/or surveys to find recurring complaints or gaps in your content.

People are bound to let you know if something is missing or confusing in your knowledge base.

Our best advice is to make gathering feedback a regular part of your workflow. Find out what customers think by sending out email surveys or adding questionnaires to the bottom of your help pages.

Once you have gathered some feedback, start making meaningful changes that reflect what you see or hear most often. You should also let your users know about these adjustments by including notes in articles or sending them notifications when there are changes. This indicates that you care and are making efforts towards enhancing their experience.

Track on-site analytics

Analytics provide valuable information on how users interact with your knowledge base. You could add Google Analytics to your knowledge base or use another tool to track metrics such as page views, bounce rates, and search terms.

Tracking top-performing help articles can help you identify which content is most useful, and tracking low-engagement pages can reveal content improvement opportunities.

Analytics also reveal common search requests that yield no results, which could highlight the need for new content. By leveraging knowledge base metrics, you can optimize your content strategy and make informed decisions on updates and improvements.

Establish a routine maintenance schedule

It's important to remember that knowledge base maintenance isn't a "one and done" task—it's an ongoing process that will help you continually improve over time.

It's a good idea to develop a timeline for conducting regular audits (e.g. monthly, quarterly, or bi-annually) so you can be sure all of the content is fresh and ready for your audience.

You can assign team members to many of the tasks covered in this article, or you can add them to your own checklist and follow it throughout the year.

Establishing a regular maintenance schedule will help ensure your knowledge base remains an authoritative, single source of truth for you and your customers.

Final thoughts

As you can tell by now, it requires time and effort to make sure your knowledge base is relevant and engaging, but the time and effort investment is 100% worth it.

We suggest saving this knowledge base maintenance checklist so you're set up for success the next time you need to audit your knowledge base.