An old copyright year in your footer won't get you sued, and there is no sign it costs you rankings by itself. What it does is tell a patient, in the last line they read before booking, that nobody has looked at the site in a while. On September 27, 2026 we checked 393 med spa homepages in 21 US cities. 265 had a copyright year we could read, and 59 of those (22%) still showed a past year. Thirty-three said 2025. Twenty-six said 2024 or earlier, and the oldest said 2018.
How we checked 393 med spa footers
The sites came from Google searches for treatments ("botox Miami", "med spa Denver") across 21 metro areas, the same sample behind our 389-site grading study. An automated check fetched each homepage, found the last © year in the page text, and compared it with 2026. 128 homepages had no year we could read, either because there was no notice at all or because the footer was drawn by JavaScript after the page loaded. Those are left out of the percentages below. Here is what the other 265 showed:
- 2026 (current): 206 sites
- 2025: 33 sites
- 2024: 9 sites
- 2023: 7 sites
- 2022: 5 sites
- 2021 and 2020: 2 sites each
- 2018: 1 site
A 2025 in September 2026 is nine months out of date. A 2022 means the footer has not been touched through three new years.
What a stale year tells a patient, and what it travels with
Patients scroll to the footer for your address, hours and phone number. If the line under those says © 2022, a careful patient starts wondering whether the prices, the provider bios and the "current specials" are from 2022 as well. For a clinic asking someone to trust it with injectables, that doubt arrives at the worst moment.
In our sample the stale year rarely came alone. Of the 59 sites with a past year, 12 (20%) also listed leftover test, sample or draft pages in their sitemap, against 15 of the 206 sites with a current year (7%). At least one broken homepage link turned up on 24% of the stale-footer sites and 18% of the current ones. Our broken links study covers where those dead ends come from.
Lorem ipsum: the louder version of the same problem
Seven of the 389 homepages whose text we could read still had "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" dummy copy live on the page. It sat in the places a theme's demo content lives:
- Under treatment headings such as Cosmetic Injectables and Facial Rejuvenation
- In a testimonial slot, directly below a real patient's review
- Under section titles like Group Events that were added from the template and never filled in
- After a real paragraph about body treatments, where a second text block was left as delivered
The pattern is the same each time. Someone adds a ready-made section from the theme, replaces the heading, and publishes before the body text is written. Page builders such as Elementor and Divi can also show or hide sections by screen size, so a block that looks finished on a laptop can show its dummy text only on a phone. Read your homepage and your top treatment pages on a phone, all the way to the bottom.
Do you even need a copyright notice?
No. The US Copyright Office's Circular 3 says a notice is optional for works published on or after March 1, 1989. Your copy and your photos are protected whether the footer mentions it or not. A notice still does one useful thing: the same circular explains that it can stop someone who copies your work from claiming they did it innocently.
In a formal notice, the year refers to when the work was first published, which is why many sites show a range such as "© 2019–2026 Clinic Name". You have three reasonable options:
- A range that updates itself: the founding year plus the current year, printed automatically. The cleanest choice.
- The current year, printed automatically: fine, and never goes stale.
- No notice at all: legal, and better than a wrong year.
How to fix it on your platform
- WordPress: the footer text usually lives in Appearance → Customize, a footer widget, or your page builder's footer template. A developer can swap the typed year for a shortcode or one line of PHP that prints the current year, so it never needs touching again.
- Squarespace, Wix and Showit: the footer year is usually typed text in a footer section. It stays put until someone edits it, so it needs changing by hand each January unless you add a small code snippet.
- Custom or agency-built sites: ask whoever maintains the site to make the year automatic. It is a one-line change.
While you are in the footer, set a recurring reminder for the first week of January and run this check:
- Update the footer year, or make it automatic.
- Confirm the address, hours and phone in the footer match your Google Business Profile.
- Open yoursite.com/sitemap.xml and look for anything named test, sample, draft or old.
- Read every treatment page on your phone, to the bottom, looking for placeholder text.
- Check promo and specials pages for last year's dates and expired offers.
- Make sure every provider in the bios still works at the clinic.
Where to start
Our free website grader runs the same checks we used for this study, including the footer year, placeholder text and every homepage link, in about 30 seconds. If you would like a person to look at the whole site, request a free audit and we will send the top fixes by email, no call. And if nobody on your team has time to remember the January list, our website care plan catches these leftovers for one flat yearly fee.