Starting a changelog for an existing product: how far back should you go?

Almost nobody starts a changelog on day one. The usual story: the product has shipped weekly for three years, a user asks "is there a changelog?", and now you're staring at a blank page that seems to demand three years of history before you're allowed to write entry one. This guide is about breaking that paralysis: what you actually owe the past (very little), where to mine the history you already wrote without noticing, and — the part that matters more than any backfill — how to make sure the changelog you start this week still exists next year.

The permission slip: you don't owe the past a full accounting

The blank page feels like a debt because a changelog implies completeness — and three years of un-logged shipping feels like three years of arrears. But nobody reads a changelog top to bottom. Readers arrive with one question — what changed recently? or when did X ship? — and a changelog that starts in the middle of your product's life answers the first question perfectly from its first day (what a changelog is for).

A start-date is not an embarrassment; hiding it is. One honest line at the bottom of the history — "This changelog starts in July 2026. The product shipped for three years before that." — costs you nothing and answers the only awkward question a deep-scrolling reader could ask.

Three backfill levels — pick by what you already have

How far back to go isn't a matter of virtue; it's a matter of raw material. There are three sane levels:

• Level 0 — start from today. One "entry zero" (below), then log every release from now on. Right choice when your history exists only in memory and closed tickets. An hour of work, and in three months you'll have a better changelog than most products ever get.
• Level 1 — backfill the greatest hits. The five to fifteen launch-grade changes from the last 6–12 months — the features a returning or evaluating user might look for. Mine your announcement tweets, blog posts, and "New!" emails; each becomes one dated entry. An afternoon of work, and the page looks lived-in from day one.
• Level 2 — full import. Only if the history already exists in structured form: a stale CHANGELOG.md, published GitHub Releases, or a disciplined git-tag history. Then backfill is a conversion job, not an archaeology job — and tools can do it (below).

The trap is attempting Level 2 with Level 0 materials: reconstructing years of history from commit messages produces a long page of reader-hostile commit dumps, and the effort usually burns the enthusiasm you needed for the part that matters — the habit.

Where history hides: sources you already wrote

Before declaring Level 0, check what you already have. In rough order of quality:

• A stale CHANGELOG.md — even one abandoned two years ago is real dated history; import it and resume it (format guide).
• GitHub Releases — if you wrote release notes there, that's a complete dated archive (open source changelog guide).
• Announcement posts, tweets, product emails — already written for readers, already dated. Best raw material for Level 1.
• Git tags — reliable dates and version numbers; the commit messages under them still need curation into reader language.
• Support-ticket resolutions — surprisingly good for fix entries, because they're already phrased as symptoms (symptom-first rule).

Backdate; never dump

One mechanical rule makes or breaks a backfill: entries carry the date the change actually shipped, not the date you wrote the entry. Twenty backfilled entries all stamped with today's date destroy the two things a dated stream is for — "what changed since I last looked?" stops being answerable, and your widget, feed, and subscribers see a twenty-item avalanche of old news presented as new. If your tool can't backdate an entry, that's not a workflow quirk; it's disqualifying for backfill.

Backfilled entries can be short — title, date, two sentences. You're building a reference index of the past, not re-announcing it (fix and feature templates compress well).

Entry zero: announce the changelog itself

Whatever level you pick, write one entry that marks the start — it does three jobs: tells existing users a new surface exists (worth a mention in your usual channels — it's a small feature launch), sets expectations, and gives the page a first entry that explains itself. Three sentences:

## We now have a changelog — 2026-07-27

Every meaningful change to [product] gets an entry here from now on —
new features, fixes, and anything that breaks or changes behavior.
Subscribe by RSS or check back after release days. Entries below this
one were backfilled from our release history.

One honesty rule: promise coverage ("every meaningful change"), not cadence ("every week!") — an over-promised cadence turns a quiet month into visible abandonment (cadence guide).

The part that matters: making it stick

Starting a changelog is a decision; keeping one is a system. Most changelogs that die, die because writing the entry depended on somebody remembering. Attach it to the release ritual instead, the same way you'd attach a deploy step: the entry gets written when the release branch is cut (writing guide), and posting is part of the ship script — one command or one curl in CI — not a separate chore for later. "Later" is where changelogs go to die; a stale changelog reads worse than none, because it looks like the product stopped (SQLite's unbroken history shows the opposite signal at full strength).

Anti-patterns

• The commit-log resurrection. Two hundred backfilled entries of fix: null check in parser (#412). Worse than starting empty — it teaches every visitor there's nothing here for them.
• The avalanche. Backfill dumped with today's date, flooding feeds and burying the one genuinely new entry.
• The placeholder page. "Changelog coming soon" shipped instead of entry zero. An empty promise ages worse than an honest start-date.
• The archaeology death-march. Three weekends reconstructing 2023 from memory, enthusiasm spent before the habit forms. The past is sunk cost; the habit is the asset.
• The fifth channel. Starting the changelog in addition to scattered tweets, a #changes Slack channel, and occasional blog posts, with no rule for what goes where. Pick the changelog as canonical and point the others at it (one-canonical-URL rule).

Where Wakelog fits

Wakelog is a free hosted changelog built so that starting late is a ten-minute job, not a project. Level 2 is one paste: drop in a stale CHANGELOG.md — or just your GitHub repo URL, and your published Releases import as dated entries — with original dates preserved and duplicate titles skipped, so re-running an import never double-posts. Level 1 is a handful of posts through the web form or API. From then on it's one curl from your ship script, a public page, RSS and JSON feeds, and an embeddable widget — and if you ever leave, your history exports back to a portable changelog.md in one GET.

Preview your CHANGELOG.md or repo — no signup   Next: how to write a changelog →

Related guides

• Migrating your changelog: switching tools without losing your history
  The history is the asset; the tool is just the container. Getting entries out, keeping original dates and permalinks alive, moving feed subscribers without losing them — and the exit-door test to run before you commit to the next tool.
• The Keep a Changelog format, explained
  The de-facto standard CHANGELOG.md format: structure, the six categories, Unreleased, version links — and the mistakes that break parsers.
• Release notes templates: copy-paste formats for every kind of change
  Seven fill-in-the-blank templates — feature, fix, breaking change, security, app store, API, digest — and the questions each one answers.

Last updated 2026-07-27 · All guides