Why your website is your biggest compliance risk — and how to fix it

When compliance teams think about marketing content review, they typically focus on new content — the email campaign going out next week, the social posts scheduled for tomorrow, the new product brochure in final review. This is understandable. New content is visible, time-pressured, and clearly within the compliance team's remit.

But the biggest compliance risk for most regulated firms isn't new content. It's the thousands of pages of legacy content sitting on their website, untouched since the last regulatory update.

Consider a typical regulated firm's web presence. There are product pages written before Consumer Duty came into force. There are blog posts from 2021 that reference risk warnings that are no longer current. There are landing pages from old campaigns that were never properly decommissioned. There are PDF factsheets linked from the website that haven't been reviewed in years.

Each of these represents a live compliance risk. The FCA's financial promotions rules apply to content that is currently accessible to consumers — not just content that was compliant when it was published. A page that was compliant in 2020 may not be compliant today.

The scale of this problem is larger than most compliance teams realise. When RegOak's website scanner runs against a typical regulated firm's web presence for the first time, it finds an average of 23 compliance issues. The majority of these are on pages that haven't been touched in over a year.

The solution is systematic. Compliance teams need a way to continuously monitor their entire web presence for compliance issues — not just review new content as it's produced. Automated website scanning, combined with a clear remediation workflow, is the only practical approach at scale.