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Track: Why Relevant Content Matters and How to Maintain It
Steffen Burzlaff
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Every piece of content goes through a journey. In this phase of the content lifecycle, the focus is on keeping your relevant content up to date and useful. If you haven’t checked out Step 1: Plan, we recommend starting there.
After planning and writing your content, you need to manage it. If you want to keep things clean and accurate, there’s no way around setting up some kind of review loop.
In this article, we’ll walk through how you can keep your content relevant, and how Atlassian tools can support that process.
What Is Content Relevance?
You’ve created something great. Now make sure it stays that way.
Content relevance means your content still answers the questions your audience is asking. It reflects their needs, uses current information, and stays aligned with what they expect to find.
Why is keeping content relevant so important? No one wants to read outdated or old content. Everyone has had the situation of following a tutorial and realizing halfway through that the content is outdated and not valid anymore. That experience is annoying, breaks trust, and is totally avoidable.
Keeping content relevant is part of managing it well. It doesn’t mean rewriting everything all the time. It means checking in regularly, making small updates, and removing content that’s no longer helpful. With a few simple habits, you can keep things tidy, trusted, and actually helpful.
Keeping Your Content Relevant Over Time
With every release, every change, or just by setting a reminder, it’s worth checking if your content still holds up.
In product documentation, like in our Good Software example This really matters. If your documentation doesn't match the current version of your product, users get frustrated and contact support. Nobody wins.
Apps like Scroll Content Quality by K15t can help by running quality checks and applying rules to your Confluence content like avoiding abbreviations or flagging outdated phrasing.
Also, don’t be afraid to delete or archive content that’s no longer relevant. It keeps your content clean, easier to manage, and more helpful for readers.
Updating Content with Confluence and Jira
Atlassian tools can help you stay on top of content updates. Use Jira to manage your work and Confluence to manage your documentation and website content in one central place. As a simple rule of thumb: a release isn’t done until the documentation is updated.
Create a Jira work item specifically for updating docs. That way, it becomes part of the process and not something someone forgets.
If the content changes for reasons outside of your release cycle, like this article might, set up reminders to review it every three to six months. With Confluence automation, you don’t even need to set those reminders manually..
Check out our article on setting up Confluence automations.
Stay in a Feedback Loop
After writing your content, get feedback. Ask teammates to test it. Authors often assume the reader already knows what they know, which isn’t always true.
When asking for feedback, be specific. What part of your content should they focus on? What type of feedback are you looking for? Let them know what stage the content is in so they don’t spend time fixing typos if it’s still a rough outline.
Using Confluence for Collaboration
Here’s how to involve teammates and give the right context:
Inline Comments: Great for feedback on specific sections. Use inline comments to highlight the part you want help with. Once resolved, mark them as done.
Page Comments: These are better for general questions like “Is this page still useful?” or “Should we delete it?”
Sharing a Page: Use the share button to send the page via email, Teams, or Slack. Add context so people know what they’re looking at and what kind of feedback you need.
Mentions: Always mention someone if you’re asking for input. It helps make sure they see it and know they’re expected to respond.
Want more? Check out our articles about sharing pages in Confluence and everything you need to know about comments in Confluence.
Wrap-Up: Keep It Relevant, Keep It Working
Keeping your content relevant might not be the most exciting part of the job, but it’s one of the most valuable. Small updates go a long way. They keep your content accurate, your team aligned, and your readers from second-guessing what’s still true.
Confluence gives you the tools to make this easier. Jira helps you track the work and make sure content updates are part of the process.
