How often to publish a changelog, and what happens when you stop
Cadence follows releases, not the calendar. The cost of stopping is not a missed post; it is a page whose most prominent fact becomes the date of the last entry.
Publish a changelog entry when a change reaches customers, which means the cadence is set by releases rather than by a calendar. For most products that lands somewhere between one entry per shipped change and one batched entry a week. What happens when you stop is more specific than "the blog goes quiet": the most prominent fact on a changelog page is the date of the newest entry, so a changelog that stops publishing keeps advertising the day the product appeared to stop. Nobody has to read the entries to draw that conclusion.
A changelog is a record of changes that reached customers, so the honest unit is the change, not the week. One entry per noticeable change works while releases are infrequent. A weekly batch works better once several small changes ship every few days, because a reader wants one place to look rather than eleven entries about copy fixes. The pattern to avoid is a promised rhythm the team cannot hold: a page that says "weekly" and updates twice a year has told its readers something worse than nothing.
| Pattern | Works when | Fails as |
|---|---|---|
| One entry per shipped change | Releases are infrequent and each one is noticeable | A wall of trivial entries once the team ships daily |
| A weekly batch | Several small changes ship each week | A backlog nobody writes up when the week gets busy |
| A monthly roundup | Changes are mostly small and the audience is not operational | A record too coarse to answer "when did this change?" |
| Whenever there is something big | Almost never, in practice | Long silences that read as a stalled product |
None of that is a search penalty, and it is worth being precise about the difference. A dormant changelog is a trust problem and a communication problem. The pages that exist stay indexed, the links to them keep working, and
Somebody deciding whether to buy your product reads the changelog for something your marketing pages cannot tell them: whether anyone is still working on it, and what happens to them when something changes.
Market4 turns one release note into a changelog page, a blog post, a mail-out and a week of social posts — and then tells you which of them brought anyone back.
In Market4, publishing a changelog entry does two things beyond putting words on a page. It re-submits the site's saved sitemap to Search Console, and archiving an entry does the same, because a sitemap that still advertises the old state is the same problem in the other direction. Separately, an entry can request an email to subscribers, and that request stays pending until an administrator approves it, so a routine publish never becomes an unintended send to a mailing list.
Publishing also refuses when the entry contains a word the app's brand kit bans, listing every occurrence with its position, and the override is an explicit acknowledgement rather than a silent bypass. This matters to cadence because it is the kind of check that costs seconds when it runs before the publish and costs a retraction when it does not.
The asymmetry is deliberate and it says something about cadence generally. A blog can be flooded to chase search traffic, so the product bounds how fast posts may go live, with a default of three per UTC day and a minimum gap of thirty minutes between them. A changelog cannot be flooded in the same way, because an entry corresponds to a release that actually happened, and a team that ships eleven times on a Tuesday has eleven things to report.
Start with the change you shipped this week, not with a reconstruction of the year you missed. Backfilling invented dates puts wrong facts into a record whose entire value is that its dates are right. If the gap needs acknowledging, acknowledge it once in the first new entry, in a sentence, and then keep publishing; readers judge a changelog by the interval between the two newest entries far more than by an apology. Repeating the apology in every entry is how a restart turns into a second silence.
Only the ones a customer could notice. A fix that changes behaviour somebody relied on, restores something that was broken, or alters a limit belongs in the record. Internal refactors, dependency bumps and fixes for bugs nobody outside the team could see belong in the commit history instead. The test is whether a reader would change what they do after reading it; if not, the entry is noise that makes the useful entries harder to find.
Batch once the pace of small changes outruns the reader's patience. One entry per change gives precise dates and a heavy page; a weekly batch gives a readable page and a coarser record. A workable middle is to batch the small changes into a dated entry and to give anything that changes behaviour, pricing or a limit its own entry, so the things people need to find are findable on their own.
No, but it is worth far more with one. A page people have to remember to visit is read by the people who already care; a feed or an email reaches the people who would have found out later, from support or from a surprise. The feed also gives other tools a way to watch the product without anyone maintaining a list, which is why a changelog with a feed keeps working after the person who set it up moves on.
It depends on what the page promised. A changelog that has published weekly for a year looks abandoned after a month; one that publishes when meaningful releases happen can go a quarter without anyone noticing. The signal readers use is the interval compared with the previous intervals, not an absolute number of weeks, which is an argument for setting an honest expectation and then meeting it.
A changelog entry that links well converts better than one that sells. The rule is destination, not persuasion: link where the reader goes to use the thing, and cut every link that exists to move them somewhere you wanted them.
A changelog migration is four decisions, not a copy and paste: where the entries live from now on, what address each one answers at, what happens to the links people already shared, and who writes the next entry.