What is a Content Freeze?
A content freeze is a period of time during a technical overhaul, translation project, or other side-wide update where content on your website can’t be edited or uploaded.
While this may sound grim, it’s not—content freezes are an important part of making sweeping improvements to the front-end and/or back-end of your website. By preventing changes for a brief period, you ensure that no work is wasted, your overhaul goes smoothly, and the transition to your new and improved website is clean and professional.
How does a content freeze work?
When your site needs major changes, you or your agency will usually begin by creating a copy of it that will be edited in a development environment. The changes and fixes they make as they work won’t be reflected on the live version of the website, allowing them to work freely and extensively test the development version as necessary.
Once the overhaul is complete, your new and improved site is ready to go—but since it was separated from the instance that was still live during the content freeze, it won’t have any changes you made to that version during the process. To prevent these changes from being lost for you or your users, you’ll implement a content freeze that temporarily disables changes to the live website.
In some development environments, a content freeze may look a little different. If all of your development takes place in the production environment, or live website, you’ll still place a content freeze on your website during work. Then, when the changes are complete, you’ll simply lift the freeze you placed on the live website. If you test changes in both a development environment and a staging environment before sending them to your live production environment, you might place a content freeze on both the live website and the staging environment for particularly complex projects.
What is a code freeze?
Code freezes apply the same concept as a content freeze to the website’s source code, and may be used to fix bugs, overhaul features, or lay the groundwork for new functionality. Since a website’s content relies on its source code to be displayed, a code freeze usually also requires a content freeze to be implemented.
Reasons for a content freeze
The most common reason for a content freeze is an ongoing technical update or code freeze to your site. Content freezes are also key in translation or regionalization projects, where large chunks of a site’s content need to be addressed with careful attention to detail. You might also implement a content freeze during rebranding due to a new CI/CD that must be applied to your web design.
What if you try to make these changes without a content freeze? Usually, you end up with a mess. When broad changes to source code, language, or design are made, each professional must be able to work in sync on the same version of the project. If changes are being actively made to the website as they work, it’s all too easy to end up with unwanted bugs, translation errors, and new content that doesn’t match the old.
Take one of svaerm’s recent regionalization projects, for example. Halfway through the 4-week process of translating the client’s English pages, the client updated the product sheet tables on their website without communicating the change, despite a content freeze being in place. Our team noticed the difference when uploading the new regionalized pages—but if we hadn’t, those regionalized pages would have been left with outdated product sheets. You can adhere to your content freezes to prevent these mistakes or, if you have to, communicate content that urgently needs to be changed to all parties involved.
At svaerm, we tackle complex projects like translation, regionalization, and relaunches with freezes that leave your content just as you intended and keep your front-end polished and professional while things are under construction.
How to handle a content freeze
Since any work you do on the live version of your site won’t be carried over to the new and improved version when the content freeze ends, your goal is to minimize the need for changes to the site during this period.
If you have any content that needs to be included in the planned project, such as a post that needs to be translated or a page containing a technical element that will be overhauled, make sure to upload it before the content freeze begins.
If your site accepts input from users or other parties, such as posts, orders, or product listings, be sure to inform them that there will be a content freeze and give them your best estimate of when it will be lifted. You can also use modified administration privileges, plugins (such as in WordPress), or other restrictions to prevent them from accessing the website for the duration of the freeze.
If you have no choice but to make changes during a content freeze, it isn’t the end of the world! You can still alter the accessible version of the website; any edits just won’t be reflected in the improved version that will soon replace it. Since there will likely be multiple parties working with the website during this process, communication and coordination is key. When you make these changes, take specific note of each one—you’ll need to repeat them all in the development version or once the new website is live.
Conclusion
Content freezes are a key part of making major changes to your website. Need an agency with extensive experience translating, regionalizing, and relaunching sites professionally with content freezes? Get in touch with our agents at svaerm using the contact form below.
