Updating Icons and Links Across Your Site

More places than you remember

A logo or a link gets added over years, by different people, in places nobody keeps a list of.

The footer is obvious and it is rarely the only one.

So a change like this week's is a prompt to find all of them, which is a job most sites have never had done.

It takes about an hour and it catches a good deal more than the icon you were looking for.

Where they hide

• The footer, on every page.
• The contact page.
• Share buttons on articles.
• The email signature template.
• Invoice and quote templates.
• An old landing page outside the template.

The last is the one that gets missed, because a page built for a campaign three years ago has its own footer that nobody has touched since.

Search rather than browse

Which is the difference between an hour and a morning.

Search your site's files for the logo file name, which finds every reference including the ones on pages you had forgotten.

Where you cannot search the files, use a site search for the platform name, which finds most of them.

A free broken link checker will crawl the whole site and list every external link, which is the same sweep from a different angle.

Any of those three is faster and more complete than clicking through pages.

Ask whoever maintains the site to run the file search for you if you cannot, since it is a two-minute task for them.

Fix the links while you are in there

Since the same sweep answers a different question.

Every external link on a site rots over time: businesses close, pages move, and associations redesign.

A link checker will list the ones returning errors and the ones redirecting, and both are worth fixing.

A dead link to a supplier or an association reads as neglect, and a visitor who clicks one concludes something about the rest of the site.

Most sites have between three and fifteen, and almost none have ever been checked.

That is the real value of this hour rather than the icon that prompted it.

A worked example

A business went looking for four social icons and found eleven references.

Two were on a landing page from an old campaign, one was in the invoice template, and one was in an email signature nobody had updated since a staff change.

The same sweep found six broken external links, including one to a supplier that had closed and one to an association page that had moved.

All of it took about ninety minutes.

The icon change was the smallest part of what got fixed.

They now run the link check once a year in January.

Check the outbound links still make sense

Which is beyond whether they work.

A link can resolve perfectly and point at something that is no longer what you meant.

A supplier page that now sells something else, an association you have left, a certification that has lapsed.

Those are worse than broken links, because they work and mislead.

Read the list of what you link to once a year and ask whether each is still something you want to point at.

The templates outlive the website

Worth stating separately.

Invoice templates, quote documents, and email signatures are frequently older than the current site and are edited by nobody.

They carry old logos, old addresses, old telephone numbers, and occasionally the name of somebody who left.

Those go to customers directly, which makes them more visible than a footer icon.

Check all three at the same time as the site, since they are the same problem in a different place.

Make it annual

Since a one-off sweep leaves the same accumulation happening again.

Put a link check and a template check in the same annual review as everything else.

It is one of the shortest items on that list and one of the most visibly worthwhile.

Note the date you did it, so next year's check knows what it is comparing against.

Keep the list of what you fixed too, since a link that broke once frequently breaks again when that site is next redesigned.

An hour a year keeps a site from acquiring the small signals of neglect that accumulate invisibly.

Check the links point where you think

A specific case worth separating from broken links entirely.

A social icon linking to the wrong account, an old profile, or a personal one rather than the business is surprisingly common and entirely invisible until somebody clicks it.

Click every one of your own social icons yourself, from the live site rather than from the editor, and confirm each lands where it should.

The same applies to the telephone link and the email address, which are the two that cost you work when wrong.

That takes two minutes and it is the single check most worth doing of everything on this list.

An icon pointing at a personal account is embarrassing rather than costly, and a telephone link with a wrong digit costs work every week until somebody notices.

The counter-case

Some of this does not matter much.

A slightly dated social icon in a footer is noticed by almost nobody, and a business with limited time has better things to do.

Automated link checkers also produce false positives, since some sites block them, so a list of errors needs checking rather than acting on directly.

And rewriting templates has a real cost where they are locked into accounting software that makes editing awkward.

In that case, note what is wrong and fix it the next time the software is updated rather than fighting it now.

Search the files for the logo name, run a link checker, fix what it finds, and check the invoice and email templates.

The hour

1. Search the files for the logo name.
2. Check pages outside the main template.
3. Run a link checker.
4. Fix broken and redirected links.
5. Read what you link to.
6. Check invoice and email templates.
7. Put it in the annual review.

Step six is the one that reaches customers, since an invoice carrying an old logo and a departed colleague's name goes directly to somebody who is paying you.

The smallest version of this problem is covered in the favicon nobody set.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.