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Keeping a Changelog for a Marketing Site

Software teams keep changelogs as a matter of habit. Marketing sites, which change just as often, rarely do. Then traffic dips or enquiries jump, and nobody can say what was altered the week before. A changelog costs a minute per change and answers that question for years.

What counts as a change worth logging

Anything a visitor, a crawler or a measurement tool could notice. Headline edits, a new form field, a swapped image, a redirect, a changed menu, a new tracking event, a plugin update, a price or offer change. If you would be unsurprised to hear "something changed on the site" and still could not say what, log it.

A format that survives busy weeks

Keep the file in the repository, or a shared document if the site is not in version control. One entry per change, newest at the top:

## <date>
- Changed: contact page heading now matches the ad wording
- Why: visitors from the campaign saw mismatched promises
- Where: contact page, both languages
- Owner: initials
- Check: form test sent and received
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Short lines beat paragraphs. The "why" line is the one people skip and the one you will thank yourself for.

Habits that make it useful

  • Write the entry when you make the change, not at the end of the week
  • Note the tool or ticket where the request began
  • Record rollbacks as entries too, with the reason
  • Mention anything that touches tracking, since that silently changes how later numbers compare
  • Keep language versions together, so nobody wonders whether Arabic was updated

Reading it later

When a metric moves, open the log first and look at the days around the movement. Often the cause is sitting there: a form change, a template update, a redirect added in a hurry. Sometimes the log shows nothing changed on your side, which is useful too, because it points you towards a seasonal pattern, a competitor or a platform change.

Treat it as living documentation. New team members can read it to learn how the site has evolved, and agencies or freelancers can see what has already been tried. If you would like help turning a marketing site into something easier to run and measure, you can start at https://thegorillavibe.com/ to see what Gorilla Vibe, a Dubai marketing agency working across the UAE and GCC, offers.

Written with AI assistance for the Gorilla Vibe marketing team.

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