Stale copyright year
The footer reads a year at least two behind the current one.
Why it matters
The footer reads a year at least two behind the current one. Visitors use the copyright year as a rough signal of whether a site is still maintained, so a notice this far behind reads as abandoned — on a page that is otherwise asking someone to sign up or pay.
How ShipReady detects it
Six page-readable Content & UX rules. Genuinely per-page: a polished homepage routinely hides a /pricing that still shows `{{plan_name}}` and a /terms governed by the laws of `[Your State]`. Reads only already-fetched HTML. Detection is uniform across all six: match a maintained pattern corpus against the page's READABLE TEXT — markup stripped, scripts stripped, and `<code>`/`<pre>`/`<kbd>`/`<samp>` stripped first — never against raw HTML. A minified bundle contains the very strings these rules look for, and a docs page legitimately displays them inside a code sample; matching source rather than prose would fire on both. Pages the crawler labelled Docs or Content are skipped entirely by the two artifact rules, because quoting an artifact is what those pages are for.
Detection is deterministic. ShipReady reports this only when it observes the condition directly, and prefers to miss a real problem over inventing one. Rule version 1.0.0.
How to fix it
This is the prompt ShipReady puts in your report — written to be pasted straight into Cursor, Claude Code, or whichever assistant built the app.
Your footer's copyright year is at least two years behind the current year, which reads to a visitor as an abandoned site. Replace the hardcoded year with one computed at render time — in JSX, {new Date().getFullYear()}; in a template language, the equivalent date helper. If you display a range, keep the start year fixed and compute only the end. This is a one-line change in a shared layout or footer component, and it stops the problem recurring every January.Frequently asked questions
- What does "Stale copyright year" mean?
- The footer reads a year at least two behind the current one.
- How serious is it?
- ShipReady rates this low. Worth fixing. Small individually, and they accumulate.
- How do I fix it?
- Paste the fix prompt on this page into Cursor, Claude Code or your AI editor. It is the same prompt ShipReady puts in your report.
- Can I check my own site?
- Yes — ShipReady scans up to ten pages of any public site for free and reports this alongside every other check. The free report lists every issue it finds and shows full evidence and a fix prompt for the critical and high-severity ones; medium and low findings are counted and unlock on Pro.
Related checks
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