How to find and replace outdated text on a Contentful site

You update outdated copy on a Contentful site by finding the entries that hold the old wording, editing the right field in each one, and publishing them. Contentful is a headless CMS, which means it stores your content as structured entries and leaves the design to your website's code. A homepage might be one Page entry linked to a Hero entry, three Feature entries, and a Call to Action entry, and each of those holds its copy in fields such as a headline, a subheading, or a button label. The sentence a visitor reads on your site is the value of one of those fields.

If you have editor access in Contentful, you can do this yourself. Open the Content tab, type the old phrase into the search bar, and Contentful lists the entries whose text contains it. You open each entry, find the field, change the wording, and click Publish. Contentful saves your edit as a change first, so an entry you edited but didn't publish still shows the old text on your site. After you publish, your site shows the new copy when it next rebuilds or when its cache refreshes, which depends on how your developers set it up.

That works for a typo on one page. It gets slow and risky when the outdated text is spread across your site, such as an old price, a renamed plan, last year's date, or a customer count that's no longer true. Contentful has no command that replaces a phrase across every entry at once, so each match is a separate edit and a separate publish. Some of the matches shouldn't change at all, like a 2024 date inside a case study that really did happen in 2024. Some entries are shared, so a call-to-action block you edit for the pricing page also changes on every other page that uses it. And some wording never lived in Contentful in the first place. Navigation labels, footer text, and parts of page templates are often written into your site's code, and no amount of searching in Contentful will find them. That's usually the point where a team calls a developer.

A good result is a site where every outdated phrase a visitor can see has been replaced, every change was a deliberate choice, the text that should stay the same stayed the same, and each new version is published and showing on the live page.

Kite does that work for you. It finds the outdated wording, decides what each instance should say now, makes the changes in Contentful once you approve them, and checks that each one went live.

Start by telling Kite what changed. You can name the exact wording:

"We renamed the Starter plan to Essentials. Find every place the site still says Starter and update it."

Or you can ask Kite to find what's out of date:

"Our pricing changed last month. Check the site for anything that still uses the old prices or plan names and fix it."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. By the time you ask, it already knows your current products, pricing, and positioning from that research, so it can recognize copy that no longer matches without a long brief. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack.

You'll need to connect your Contentful account through OAuth on Kite's Integrations page, which means you sign in to Contentful and approve Kite's access. If your account can see more than one space, you choose the space that holds your website's content. Then add your website to Kite by importing its GitHub repository. With the site imported, Kite knows which page each piece of wording appears on, and it can change wording that lives in your site's code as well as wording that lives in Contentful.

Changes to your live Contentful content come from someone who can edit the website directly in Kite, such as the site's owner.

Kite decides what's outdated by comparing what your site says with what's true about your business today. It reads your live pages the way a visitor sees them, including pages that rely on JavaScript to load their text. Then it checks that copy against what it knows from your team's research: your current plan names and prices, your product names, your positioning, and recent changes you've told it about.

That's how it catches the outdated text nobody thought to search for. A request about a new price also turns up the FAQ answer that quotes the old one, the comparison table that still lists a retired feature, and the meta description that names last year's plan. Kite also recognizes wording that should stay. A dated customer story, a changelog entry, or a blog post about an old launch describes something that really happened, so Kite leaves it alone and tells you it did.

Kite traces each outdated phrase to the exact entry and field that holds it before it changes anything. It searches your Contentful space for the wording, reads your content types and their fields, and works out which field holds the phrase in your space's default locale.

Three things can turn up at this step, and each one changes what Kite does next:

• The wording sits in one field of one entry. This is the common case, such as the headline field of a Hero entry or the answer field of an FAQ entry.
• The wording appears in more than one entry, or the entry belongs to a different page. Kite lists each match with its entry, its field, and its current text, and you say which ones to change. When the entry it found isn't the kind of entry the page you asked about reads from, Kite tells you so, because that entry may feed a different page.
• The wording isn't in Contentful. When you import your site, Kite works out which pages get their wording from Contentful and which keep it in your site's code. When a page's wording lives in the code, Kite changes it there instead (see below).

Kite writes each replacement for the place it appears, rather than swapping one word for another everywhere. Changing "Starter" to "Essentials" works in a plan table, but a sentence like "Starter is perfect for solo founders" may need a different verb or a new detail once the plan has changed. Kite keeps each replacement in your brand voice and close to the length of the original, so a button label still fits its button and a headline still fits its line.

Before it publishes anything, Kite shows you the full list of changes it plans to make. For each one, you see the page, the entry, the field, the current text, and the proposed text. You approve the list in the conversation or ask for changes to any line.

Kite makes one change per field, and it publishes each one as soon as it's written, because a Contentful entry with unpublished changes still shows the old text on your site. For each approved change, Kite reads the entry's current version, writes the new text into the field, and publishes the entry. Contentful refuses an edit made against an out-of-date version, so if someone on your team edited the same entry in the meantime, Kite doesn't overwrite their work. It looks up the entry again and shows you what it now says before it tries again.

Kite edits text fields, which Contentful calls Short text and Long text. Those hold most headlines, subheadings, button labels, FAQ answers, and meta descriptions. When an outdated sentence sits inside a Rich Text field, such as the body of a blog post, Kite tells you the entry and the exact sentence so you can change it in Contentful's editor. That way the formatting around it, such as links and bold text, stays intact.

Kite changes wording outside Contentful through your site's GitHub repository, so text in a navigation menu or a page template gets updated in the same pass. Kite makes the edit in the code and merges it into your main branch, and your own deployment ships it. If your team protects that branch, Kite opens a pull request instead, and the change goes live when someone merges it. Either way, no one has to find the right file.

After each publish, Kite reads the entry back from Contentful and confirms two things: the field holds the new wording, and the published version has caught up with the edit. If the change landed but Kite can't confirm it, it says so and asks you to check that entry in Contentful, rather than reporting it as done or trying the write a second time.

Kite then posts a summary in the conversation where you asked. It lists every change it made, with the page, the entry, the field, and the old and new text. It also lists the matches it left alone and why, any Rich Text sentences waiting for you in Contentful's editor, and any code changes with their status. Each line comes with a link to the page where the change will show. Your site picks up the new copy on its own rebuild or cache schedule, so a page may show the old text for a short while after Contentful says it's published.

When Kite finishes, your Contentful entries hold the current wording, your live pages show it, and your conversation with Kite holds a record of every change.