Central Coast Council Moves to Fix Hundreds of Duplicate Images Plaguing Its Revamped Website This Week

Central Coast Council's digital team began a systematic sweep of its website on Monday after an internal audit flagged more than 300 instances of duplicate image files clogging the platform's content management system. The problem, which had been accumulating since the site's relaunch following council's exit from state administration in late 2023, was identified during a quarterly review tied to the broader Gosford CBD renewal communications project.

The issue matters now because council has been ramping up its online presence to promote major planning consultations — including the Mann Street precinct rezoning proposal and the Gosford Waterfront activation plan — and sluggish page loads were undermining engagement at a critical moment. NSW July school holidays typically push a spike in residents checking council's parks, events and development application portals.

What the Audit Found and Where the Problem Concentrated

The duplicates were found clustered in three areas of the site: the DA tracking portal, the Have Your Say engagement hub used for projects including the Woy Woy Peninsula masterplan, and the news archive covering flood resilience announcements for suburbs along Wyong Road. Many files had been uploaded multiple times by different staff members working across council's Gosford and Wyong service centres after a permissions restructure in early 2025 removed clear ownership of the media library.

Digital asset bloat of this kind is a known cost driver. According to the Australian Web Industry Association's 2025 benchmarking report, local government websites carrying unmanaged duplicate media libraries face average remediation costs of between $8,000 and $22,000 depending on the size of the content management system — a range that lands squarely in the budget sensitivity zone for a council still rebuilding reserves after its period under NSW state administration, which ended formally in December 2023.

The council's media library had grown to more than 14,000 individual files by June 30, according to figures presented at the July 1 ordinary council meeting agenda papers. The duplicate sweep is expected to reduce that number by roughly 25 per cent once complete.

The Fix and What Residents Should Expect

Council's ICT unit is running the deduplication process in two stages. The first — automated flagging using a checksum comparison tool — ran across the full library between Monday and Wednesday. The second stage, manual review of approximately 80 ambiguous files where images are near-identical but not pixel-perfect matches, is scheduled to wrap up by July 11.

Pages most likely to show temporary placeholder images or broken thumbnails during the cleanup include the Gosford Performing Arts Centre event listings on the Central Coast Council website and several heritage trail pages covering the Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council cultural sites. Council posted a brief notice on its homepage on Wednesday advising residents of possible image display issues through next Friday.

The broader lesson for Central Coast is structural. The council's digital governance framework — put in place as part of the recovery plan overseen by the Office of Local Government — does not currently mandate a designated digital asset manager role. Advocacy groups including Local Government Professionals Australia NSW have pushed member councils to create such roles as AI-generated and stock imagery multiply the scale of content being uploaded.

Residents trying to access the Have Your Say portal for the ongoing Woy Woy Peninsula masterplan consultation, which closes July 18, are advised to clear their browser cache if images fail to render. The council's customer service line at the Gosford Administration Building on Wyong Road remains open weekdays from 8.30am to 5pm for anyone needing printed copies of consultation documents.