Scroll to the bottom of almost any website.
Somewhere down there, next to the privacy policy and a social row you never click, sits a copyright line. © 2023 OldSite Inc., when it is already 2026.
Even experienced engineers hardcode that year. It’s embarrassing.
An outdated copyright year is a quiet signal that your company doesn’t pay attention to the details. It makes your website feel abandoned, the way a storefront with last year’s holiday banner still up feels abandoned. Visitors wonder, are you still active? Are you still developing?
No one invests in a dead product.
Serious businesses always have an updated copyright year. The year is one of those details that show your customers you’re active and building.
It strengthens your brand.
Why does an updated copyright year matter?
As a product design engineer, this is the kind of thing I obsess over.
Design is not only the hero animation or the spring on a button. It’s whether the site still looks alive in January. It’s whether or not the year indicates to your customer that you’re still around, working hard on the product.
Sure, you could hard-code the year. Update it every year on January 1st. But no one puts a task like this on the calendar. Even worse, this approach requires a hotfix commit if you’re not ready to release whatever’s on your staging branch.
But it’s a solvable problem.
What is LiveCopyright?
Introducing LiveCopyright.
The most boring, uninteresting component you’ll find on DesignPass.dev.
It is a small React component that reads the live calendar year at render time. From now on, it’ll always show the correct year. No more stale © 2024 nonsense. It comes with an optional suffix if you want “All rights reserved.”
No other React component library out there gives you these simple tools, because they don’t care about your brand. They just care about selling flash animations.
We use this across the Footer blocks we ship. That way, you’ll have one less headache to deal with every year, and your brand will be as fresh as last night’s code commit.
Try it
Drop it in & move on with your life.
Free, MIT-licensed, installable via the DesignPass registry.