Launching GOV.UK's new content and publishing guidance

Around 3,000 people across government publish content on GOV.UK. That’s a significant number of individuals using our tools and writing to a consistent style and standard. In the GOV.UK Content Operations team at the Government Digital Service (GDS), we’re at the end of a major project to improve the guidance for government publishers. This has culminated in the launch of the new GOV.UK Content and publishing guidance site, which brings together all relevant guidance in one easy-to-navigate place for the first time.

By improving this guidance, we’ve made it quicker and easier for thousands of publishers to find what they need - helping publishers to save time and improve the quality of GOV.UK content across government.

Here’s what we’ve done – and how we did it.

The discovery: was our guidance doing the job?

In 2014, our guidance for government publishers was first published on GOV.UK, in a then-new ‘manuals’ format. There were 4 manuals - our style guide, content design guidance, ‘how to publish’ guidance and how to get support from GDS. There’s actually a blog post from the time if you’d like a trip down memory lane. 

In GOV.UK Content Operations, we ran a discovery to see if those manuals were still doing the job. This raised a few main issues. 

Many users relied on search to find the answers to their guidance needs. But as the manuals were published on GOV.UK, the guidance content was competing with everything else on GOV.UK in search results. Each manual has its own search bar, but that would only cover that manual - there was no way for users to search across just the 4 guidance manuals.

The manuals themselves had also become very long. The format meant they could be split into chapters, but each chapter was then a single page of content with accordion headings. For the amount of guidance content we had, this led to a structure that was no longer fit for purpose. 

If not the manuals, then where?

We explored several options for a replacement. We considered how well these options would address our main problem statements, how easy each would be to build, and how easy it would be to maintain. The eventual decision from this evaluation was to use the same static site generator used to make the GOV.UK Publishing Design Guide, because:

it’s an easy-to-use platform for building a new site with GOV.UK styles and components it allowed us to develop a two-layer taxonomy for grouping content it would enable us to provide all of the guidance in a single place, with a single search and navigation as guidance about writing and publishing for civil servants, it felt more suitable to move the guidance off GOV.UK, in line with the GOV.UK proposition

We are indebted to the good people who have contributed towards the X-GOV Eleventy plugin, a wonderful community-developed resource that allowed us to build the new site with GOV.UK style and components.

(Re)designing the taxonomy

Alongside the question of where to publish our guidance, we had to plan our new structure. With our discovery learnings, we didn’t want to just lift the 4 manuals as they were onto an off-GOV.UK platform. 

The Content Operations team took every section of every manual and sorted them into ‘keep’, ‘merge’ (with another similar section from elsewhere in the manuals) or ‘remove’. With that, we took a new approach to grouping the sections into topics and sub-topics. While each manual effectively just had a single-layer taxonomy, we wanted to further divide the content into subtopics to make it more manageable. 

Coming up with a new set of topics and subtopics. 

We tested our new taxonomy using a tree test. Participants were given several “where would you expect to find information about x?” tasks and navigated through our proposed taxonomy. The results were very promising, with only a few further tweaks needed based on users’ responses. 

Rewriting 130+ pages of content

With a taxonomy in mind and a platform ready to populate, we began the process of redesigning the content. Merging so many previously separate sections of the manuals was a hefty task, which involved rewriting more than 130 pages of content. We ran a series of internal workshops as a team to plan this work and had weekly meetings as the work progressed. These were to discuss issues that arose, content patterns that could be used across the site and points of clarification around the style and tone of voice to use.

The private beta

Led by our user researcher, we ran a closed private beta of the new guidance. This was made up of:

a ‘diary study’, to capture ongoing unmoderated feedback of users’ experience at the point of use, during or after using the guidance to complete a task interviews and usability testing with selected participants, to evaluate the experience of using the updated structure guidance through questions and monitoring users completing 2 tasks

We’re very grateful to those publishers who participated in this research. Their feedback is crucial to us making something that works for the whole GOV.UK content community. 

We’ve learned from the private beta that the update is a positive one overall. Users reported a better experience and the majority of those observed were able to complete tasks. Combining the guides, restructuring the core sections and reviewing the content have made it easier for users across all user groups to find the right information and find it more quickly. 

Some of the feedback from users included:

“The guidance now has a completely different structure, which I find way more helpful compared to what it was before… once you get used to this new structure, it's pretty easy to navigate around it”.

“Feels like it's much more contained than the clicking around that would be going on (in the current version)".

"I've only got positive things to say".

There are still things we can improve upon, and which we’ve been iterating since the end of the private beta. But knowing this first iteration of the new guidance site will be easier to use for our 3,000 GOV.UK publishers is a satisfying outcome to the beta!

What’s next

The new GOV.UK content and publishing guidance site is live! We’re really proud as a team and excited for GOV.UK publishers to use it - and continue to tell us how it could be better.

One of the main themes of the private beta feedback was the performance of the search function - we’ve altered how it works, and will continue to monitor how it performs. 

Any changes to the site are going to be captured on the ‘What’s new?’ page, and users can give us feedback through the banner on every page below the topic menu.

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https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/08/launching-gov-uks-new-content-and-publishing-guidance/

seen at 15:49, 8 June in Inside GOV.UK.