A year end page review is the cheapest audit you will run on your site all year. One pass over the homepage, forty minutes maybe, and you decide what stays, what goes, and what gets rewritten before January. Nobody bills you for it. Skipping it costs you the same outdated intro line carried into another year.
Most people skip it because the page still loads. That is the trap. A homepage that opens fine and says the wrong thing is worse than a broken one, because you get no signal that anything is off. An annual page review is how you go get that signal on purpose.
## What an annual page review actually checks
| Section | What you are looking for | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Intro line | Does it still describe what you did this year | 5 min |
| Portfolio | Are the top three pieces from the last 12 months | 10 min |
| Links | Any dead URL, any account you abandoned in March | 5 min |
| Updates feed | Anything older than six months sitting on top | 5 min |
| Contact and main action | Does it point at the work you want more of | 5 min |
| About | Numbers, titles and roles that changed | 10 min |
Forty minutes across six checks. That table is the whole audit. The rest of this piece is about reading what you find.
## Pull the numbers before you rewrite
Open your visitor data first and write down three numbers: total views this year, the month with the most views, and where the views came from. If the number is small, do not read that as failure. A personal page with 40 visits a month and two messages from people you wanted to hear from is doing its job.
What you are hunting for is a mismatch. If most traffic arrives from one platform and your opening paragraph was written for a different audience, that gap is the most useful thing in the whole review.
## Cut first, add second
Nearly everyone does this backwards. The December instinct is to add: a new section, a badge, a year in review personal note bolted onto the bottom. Hold off for one pass. Remove first. The project you no longer want to be hired for. The link to the account you stopped using in March. The headline describing a job you left.
Cutting also takes the least time of anything on this list, and it changes how the rest of the page reads. Whitespace is a decision too.
## The year in review personal note
This is the one place where adding is right. Three or four lines near the top, saying what you actually did this year and what you want more of next year. Keep it concrete. "Shipped four client sites and finally learned to turn down rush jobs" tells a visitor something. "Growth, learning and new challenges" tells them nothing.
Put a date on it. A note with a date reads like a person wrote it. One without reads like a template that has been sitting there since 2024.
## FAQ
**How often should I run an annual page review?**
Once a year is the floor. If your work changes fast, run a lighter version each quarter and keep the full pass for December.
**What if I have no analytics installed?**
Use what you have: how many times someone mentioned the page in conversation, the messages it generated, the interviews it led to. A rough count beats no count.
**Should I rewrite the whole page or just sections?**
Sections. Full rewrites are where people lose the parts that were working, and then cannot tell which part caused the drop.
## One thing you can finish tonight
Open the page, read only the first screen, and fix the one line that is out of date. That is the review started.
Start from the [homepage](/). If you want to know what to delete first, [the anti-patterns piece](/blog/homepage-mistakes-anti-patterns) covers the five most common ones, and for keeping a record of what you changed, [changelogs on personal pages](/blog/changelogs-on-personal-pages) has the format.