After the Confetti: Auditing the Copy Your Website Relaunch Left Behind

Launch day is great. Someone brings pastries, the homepage looks the business, and everyone agrees the new tone is much more us.

Then the invoice confirmation email goes out, still signed off with the old strapline. The FAQ says delivery takes five working days. The homepage says next day. A prospect reads both, screenshots the mismatch, and forwards it to procurement.

That's the post-launch hangover: the copy that never got invited to the party.

Why this keeps happening

A relaunch is usually a design and build project with a copy workstream bolted onto the homepage and a handful of key pages. Everything else — the transactional, the internal, the exported, the embedded — sits outside the sprint board, so it stays exactly as it was, sometimes for years.

The problem isn't laziness. It's that nobody owns the whole estate. Design owns the templates, marketing owns the campaigns, sales owns the deck, finance owns the invoice footer, and the CRM emails belong to whoever set them up in 2019 and has since left.

Sweep one: the pages you didn't think of as pages

Start with the screen furniture. Some of it is written once and never seen again by anyone in the business:

• Meta titles and descriptions — still describing the old positioning, or worse, auto-generated from a template with your old company name in it
• FAQs — the single most contradiction-prone page on most UK websites
• 404 and thank-you pages — often the only place a customer sees your voice at a moment of mild frustration or delight
• Cookie and privacy banners — the wording, and the date on the policy
• Pricing footnotes and terms summaries — where last year's offer quietly lingers
• Alt text and image captions — leftover filenames and old product names
• Career pages and job specs — nothing says "new brand" like a vacancy written in the previous tone of voice

Open the site in a private window and click everything. Every link, every footer item. Ten minutes, and you'll have a list.

Sweep two: the things that arrive by email

Now the surfaces that live outside the site, in inboxes where your prospect can't be redirected or refreshed.

Pull every automated email you have and read them back to back. Order confirmations, welcome sequences, password resets, quote acknowledgements, review requests, abandoned basket nudges, renewal reminders, the newsletter template. You're looking for three things: old straplines, old pricing, and old promises.

It's worth doing the same for the plain-text ones. Automated plain-text emails are where tone of voice goes to die — clipped, robotic, and often signed by a person who no longer works there.

Sweep three: the exported stuff nobody can edit

PDFs are a special case because they escape. Once a brochure, case study, capability statement or price list is in someone's downloads folder, it is out of your control and still speaking for you.

Check for: version numbers in the filename, dates in the footer, contact details for a departed colleague, and any claim the new site no longer makes. If a document can't be updated quickly, add a visible version and review date so a reader knows how fresh it is.

Sweep four: sales decks and the champion's forward

Your sales team will keep using the old deck because it's on their desktop and it works. That's not defiance — it's inertia, and it's your problem to solve with a clean replacement and a short note explaining what changed and why.

While you're in there, check the one-pager that gets forwarded without you. If the new message only exists on your website, it dies at the first forward.

The contradiction hunt

Once you've listed everything, do a single pass looking only for conflicts. Not typos, not tone — conflicts. Opening hours in three places. Lead times in two. Two different descriptions of what's included in the base package. A promise of "no setup fees" sitting near a setup fee.

Pick the most generous and most cautious version of each claim, and reconcile. This is the bit that actually protects trust, and it's usually a twenty-minute job per claim once someone with authority is in the room.

Give it an owner and a date

An audit with no owner becomes a document nobody opens. Assign one person — not a committee — to hold the inventory, and put a recurring review in the diary. Quarterly is plenty for most UK businesses; monthly for anything with pricing or regulatory content.

A simple rhythm works better than a big one-off push: a thirty-day fix for anything factually wrong, a sixty-day pass on tone, and a ninety-day review of the structure. What you're really building is a list that stays alive.

The bit people skip

Tell the team. Not with a launch email, but with a short, plain brief: here's the new message, here's what we no longer say, here's where the current files live. Ten minutes of explanation saves months of drift.

And if you'd rather have someone walk the whole estate with a clipboard and a slightly unforgiving eye, that's the sort of copy audit Fi Phillips Copywriting does on a Friday afternoon with the kettle on.