Old years in the footer and legal pages
An outdated copyright line isn't a legal problem, but it's a telling one: it shows every visitor exactly how long it's been since anyone checked the site. Set the footer year dynamically from the system date, and separately check year references in headings, price sheets and legal details that no automation touches.
Find old years automatically
Enter your address — DustOff checks where yesterday's number is still showing.
No account, no credit card. Takes a minute.
Legally irrelevant, humanly not
Copyright exists automatically the moment content is created, regardless of any notice. So a wrong year in the footer carries no legal consequence.
It carries a different one: visitors read that number as the date of the last check-up. "© 2023" in 2026 answers the question "is this business still active?" in the worst possible way — before anyone has read a single service description.
Set the number correctly, once
In the footer, the year should be generated from the system date, not typed as fixed text. On most platforms that's a single line of code or a setting in the design editor.
If a founding year should stay visible, the usual format is "© 2014–2026": the first number fixed, the second dynamic.
Places no automation touches
Only the footer becomes dynamic automatically. Everything else stays exactly where it was typed:
- Headings like "Our Pricing 2024"
- Downloads: "catalog-2024.pdf"
- Legal pages: leadership names, registration details, address
- Copy that says "for over 10 years" but was written three years ago
- Image captions and dates on case studies
Why this one detail matters more than it should
The footer year is the only piece of content on a website whose accuracy every visitor can judge instantly, without knowing anything about the business. Nobody outside the business can tell if a price is correct. Anyone can tell if a year is.
That's why an old number in the footer lands harder than any design choice: it's the one spot where the state of upkeep is readable at a glance, with zero effort from the visitor.
Once a year — or let something remind you
The turn of the year is the natural checkpoint for this pass. It takes ten minutes once you know where to look, and it still gets skipped, year after year, for most small sites.
DustOff catches old years in text automatically and writes to you when one has fallen out of date.
A short checklist for the January pass
Bundle the year check with a few other things that also change on January first, so the whole pass happens in one sitting instead of trickling out over the year.
- Footer copyright line
- Year numbers in headings and page titles
- Pricing sheets and program listings for the new year
- Holiday hours for the current year
- Any "as of" date in legal text, if something actually changed
Häufige Fragen
- Does the copyright year need to be current?
- Not legally. For the impression your site makes, yes — visitors read it as a signal of how well maintained the site is.
- How do I set the year automatically?
- Pull it from the website's system date instead of typing it as fixed text. Most content management systems have a block or a short code snippet for the footer.
- Is checking the footer enough?
- No. Years in headings, filenames and legal pages stay put and stand out to visitors just as much.
- What's the correct format for showing a founding year alongside the current one?
- "© 2014–2026" is standard: the founding year fixed, the current year generated automatically so it never needs manual updating again.
- Can an old year hurt search rankings, not just trust?
- Not directly, but indirectly: visitors who read it as a sign of neglect are more likely to leave quickly, and that behaviour can affect how a page performs over time.