PDFs are one of the hardest areas of website content management for digital team in terms of keeping them up to date, making changes when required and ensuring they are accessible. They can also create a headache when a large number of PDFs need to be reviewed or updated due to regulatory changes, to ensure accessibility compliance, or when considering migrating content onto a new website.

In this article we’re going to explore the challenges associated with managing PDFs on your website, why it is important to actively do so and how innovative, new Sitemorse functionality based on client feedback can help you manage your website PDF documents.

Seven challenges of managing PDFs

There are a number of reasons why there are numerous challenges surrounding PDF management on any website.

1. An archive rapidly builds up

   Generally, when a PDF document is generated it’s seldom checked and updated, so a considerable archive on a website can be built up over several years. Exactly what and where these PDFs are can be very hard to keep track of.

2. PDFs aren’t usually immediately viewable or editable

   Unlike a web page, a PDF document isn’t usually viewable without an extra click either through the browser or even through a Content Management System (CMS). Editors may even need to access a separate system if PDFs are stored in a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. This means that obvious issues are less likely to be spotted and get missed. Additionally, a PDF isn’t just editable there and then, so you can’t just go and quickly correct an obvious mistake on the fly.

3. PDFs are seldom managed by the website team and involve multiple stakeholders

   PDFs tend to not be owned or managed by the website team. They may be owned by a range of different content owners throughout your organisation or a separate design team. They may even be provided by a third-party agency or produced by another organisation altogether. This means getting a PDF updated can be a longer and more convoluted process than updating other digital content.  It can also involve working with multiple stakeholders.

4. You may have to return to the original source file

   Depending on the extent of the edits that need to be done, changing a PDF can also mean returning to the original source file which may be in Word, Adobe InDesign or another desktop package. For older PDFs it is not uncommon for the source files to be hard to find or even lost, again adding time and cost to the process of updating. It is also possible that the PDF itself has been edited in Adobe Acrobat so there may be updates that are not reflected in the original source file.

5. PDF links are a challenge

   When you move or change a PDF you also have to manage all the links associated with it – pages linking to it, links within the PDF, links you have to PDFs on third party websites and more. While this is a general challenge for all website content, when you don’t even have a firm idea of all the PDFs you have on your website, managing the associated links is even more complicated.

6. Content Management Systems aren’t geared up to managing PDFs

   Most CMSs don’t have a facility to help manage your PDF collection and keep them up to date. Most CMSs treat PDFs as a blob of binary content, much the same way they treat an image. The CMS almost never looks inside the PDF to check if all the links are good and all the emails work. Once a PDF is published, the CMS tends to ignore it.

7. Managing PDFs is not usually a high priority

   Managing website PDFs is not always the priority it should be; both stakeholders and busy web teams can rank it quite low down on the “to do” list. This point of view exposes organisations to risks associated with accessibility or content changes which are driven by compliance and regulatory changes .

   The significant build-up of a PDF archive also means that managing them can feel like a huge task; it’s also fiddly and potentially quite tedious, so digital managers may put off doing something about it until they absolutely have to. There is also unlikely to be any budget set aside for managing PDFs on your website.

8. Responsibility for the PDF is not always clear

   Who is responsible for a PDF is often not clear because different teams are responsible for different parts of the process. For example, a builder might submit a proposal as a PDF, the planning team are responsible for reviewing the PDF proposal, and the web team are responsible for making sure the PDF is available on the website. In this case, it is not clear who should make sure the PDF is accessible and free from broken links. When busy teams have the possibility to delegate the responsibility to another team, updating the PDF can end up simply not being done.  

Why managing your website PDFs is important

While it’s perfectly understandable to deprioritise managing your PDFs, it is important to give them some love and attention from time to time.  There are a number of reasons for this.

• Accessibility compliance

  PDFs are still digital content on your website that needs to be considered in the same terms as the accessibility compliance of your web pages. Having an accessible website is a legal requirement and often a regulatory requirement too; to work towards compliance you need to consider your PDFs too. Content is content, regardless of the format in which it is presented.

• Regulatory compliance

  If you work in a regulated industry like Financial Services, you’ll know that you have to make sure your content complies with various rules and guidelines. Required changes may be few and far between but they do happen from time to time and can come quickly; you will need to ensure these changes are made on PDFs. The best way to do this is to manage your PDFs on an ongoing basis so you don’t expose yourself to risks and can implement changes swiftly and easily.

  For example, if financial regulations say you can no longer use a specific term on your website, most web teams can locate the pages with the term quite easily but many web teams find it difficult to locate the PDFs. Often, looking in PDFs is overlooked by the web team.

• Brand compliance

  Internally you may also want to ensure all your content is compliant with your brand and values, including your PDFs, especially if they are particularly old.

• Up to date content is always better

  While it is more accepted that a PDF document dated 2017 will pertain to the situation in 2017 (and may have a disclaimer that covers this aspect), in terms of the impact on users content if the PDF is fully up to date with the right details and contacts it will always to leave a better impression. Common issues like broken links in a PDF absolutely leave the wrong impression.

• PDFs can make a content migration much more complex

  Often managing PDFs is ignored until it becomes a necessity. In a content migration for a new website or website upgrade, a new CMS or introduction of a new Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, a PDF archive can represent a significant challenge relating to time, resources and effort. Ongoing management of your PDFs and oversight of your PDF collection can ease the pain for your content migration project.

How to manage your PDFs

Sitemorse was one of the first digital improvement and compliance products to report on PDFs. We’ve now extended our capabilities to provide a highly useful report which effectively provides an inventory of the PDFs linked from your website and provides a breakdown of the information you need to start managing them. The report provides the baseline for any project or continuing effort to improve or drive compliance across your PDF collection.

We’ve worked closely with several clients to shape the report, ensuring it meets the needs of website teams and works in the “real world”.

Because work around PDFs is often spread across multiple stakeholders and potentially third parties, the report is sent via email as an Excel format attachment. This can be available monthly, or on an on-demand basis.  Viewed in Excel, the report provides details in separate worksheets of the following:

• A summary overview of numbers of PDFs, different issues and more, to be able to track on a regular progress, as well as help for each of the other worksheets.
• A list of all the PDFs hosted by you and which of your pages link to them.
• A list of broken links contained in the PDFs.
• Any erroneous email addresses contained in the PDFs.
• PDFs accessibility tests.
• Any duplicate PDFs, that is, PDFs that are exactly the same but in in two or more locations on yours site.
• Any missing PDFs, that is, your pages that link to a PDF but we could not find the PDF.

This provides a comprehensive approach to managing your PDFs and will prove essential to any team needing to improve in this area.

Don’t put off managing your PDF collection

Managing PDFs across your websites gets progressively harder the longer you leave it; however, it is important in terms of compliance, branding and customer service. The new PDF report in the Sitemorse platform provides a great starting point to achieving a better experience around your PDF reports for your visitors.