How to update your website FAQ from customer questions, once a month
Most FAQ pages are written once, from guesses, and never touched again. A useful one is fed by the questions customers actually send. Once a month, count the questions that arrived more than twice, answer each on the site in plain words, and the following month check whether those questions came in less often.
Where the questions are
Look in every place customers write to you, not just the website. On an Anticode site, every contact and booking form is saved in the project; if you send them to Google Sheets, Airtable or Notion with a connector, they're already in a table you can scan. Add the questions that came by phone, email, social messages and at the counter. Staff who answer the phone know the top five without looking.
The monthly hour
- Pull last month's messages into one place: export or scroll the project's submissions, the sheet if you use one, and a note from whoever takes calls.
- Tally the questions, not the messages. One email can hold three questions. Use a simple list with a tick per occurrence: "parking?", "do you do gluten-free?", "can I change my booking time?".
- Pick the ones asked three times or more, plus any question whose wrong answer causes real trouble (allergies, cancellations, refunds).
- Write each answer in the customer's words, answer first: "Yes, there's free parking behind the building, entered from Mill Lane." One to three sentences.
- Add them to the site. If your site has an FAQ section or a separate FAQ page, ask in a sentence: "add these three questions and answers to the FAQ", then refine the wording in the visual editor.
- Change the page the question is really about, too. If people keep asking about parking, the contact page needs it as well, not only the FAQ.
- Publish, and write the month's questions and their counts at the bottom of your tally sheet.
Should the FAQ be a CMS collection?
For a few dozen answers that change rarely, keep the FAQ as part of the page and edit it by change request or in the visual editor. If several people maintain a long FAQ, or answers change often (seasonal opening, delivery cut-offs), a CMS collection called questions with question, answer and topic fields lets them edit entries in the dashboard. Its pages are served at /questions/ and one per entry, and they show edits as soon as they're saved, which the main pages don't until you publish again.
Checking it worked
Next month's tally is the test. For each question you answered, compare the count before and after. A question that drops from nine to two was worth answering. One that doesn't move usually means the answer is hard to find, unclear, or on the wrong page, so move it, rewrite it, or put it where people look before they write (the booking page, the pricing section).
| Question | September | October | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is there parking? | 9 | 2 | Answered in FAQ and on the contact page |
| Can I change my booking? | 7 | 6 | Answer moved next to the booking calendar |
| Do you do gluten-free? | 5 | 1 | Answered in FAQ and on the menu |
| Are you open on bank holidays? | 4 | 4 | Added to the hours line on every page |
What to leave out
- Questions nobody asks, written to sound thorough.
- Marketing dressed up as a question ("Why are we the best choice?").
- Answers that say "it depends" without saying on what.
- Policies that belong in your Terms; summarise them and link instead.
What goes wrong
- The FAQ grows to sixty questions
- Group by topic and retire answers to questions nobody has asked in six months.
- Answers go out of date
- Every price, time and policy in the FAQ is also somewhere else. Change both on the same day.
- Staff give different answers
- Share the FAQ with staff as the agreed wording.
Limits
Anticode doesn't read your enquiries, group questions or suggest answers, and there's no per-page analytics to show how often the FAQ is read; your tally is the measure. There's no search box or chat on published pages, since they run no scripts. See writing an FAQ page, the FAQ page builder and following up on website leads.
Questions people ask
How often should I update my FAQ?
Monthly works for most small businesses: often enough to catch new questions, rarely enough to stay a short job.
How many questions should an FAQ have?
As many as customers really ask more than occasionally. For most small businesses that's eight to twenty.
Can Anticode update your website FAQ from customer questions automatically?
Not with Anticode. The tally and the wording are a person's job; adding the answers takes a sentence or a few edits.