Best Practices for Maintaining Your Design System

Creating a design system is the easy part.
Maintaining it — that’s where most teams fall short.

A great design system isn’t a static file. It’s a living product that grows, adapts, and occasionally breaks. If you don’t maintain it, it slowly becomes ignored, outdated, or worse — a blocker.

Here’s how to keep your design system clean, scalable, and actually used.

🧠 Why Maintenance Matters

• Avoids duplication: Without upkeep, designers start creating their own versions.

• Reduces tech debt: Outdated tokens and unused components cause messes later.

• Keeps adoption high: People use what’s reliable and updated.

• Builds trust: A maintained system becomes a source of clarity, not confusion.

💬 If your system feels stale, your team will stop relying on it.

🛠️ Best Practices for Maintaining a Design System

1. Assign a System Owner

✅ Someone must be responsible — a design ops lead, system manager, or shared rotation.
✅ Their role: governance, cleanup, versioning, triage.

💬 Ownership = accountability.

2. Set Up a Regular Audit Schedule

✅ Quarterly reviews for outdated components, unused tokens, broken links
✅ Look for inconsistencies in naming, spacing, or documentation
✅ Archive deprecated elements with clear status

💬 A healthy system needs hygiene.

3. Use Version Control (for Real)

✅ Document major changes (added/removed components, updated behaviors)
✅ Communicate what's breaking or deprecated before rollout
✅ Label versions clearly in Figma and code (e.g. v1.4 → v1.5)

💬 No one likes surprises — especially in production.

4. Build a Feedback Loop

✅ Add a simple way for designers/devs to flag issues
✅ Keep a public changelog and roadmap
✅ Regularly collect usage data (most-used, least-used components)

💬 Great systems are designed with the team — not just for the team.

5. Document as You Update

✅ Update docs alongside changes
✅ Add do/don’t examples with each component
✅ Make sure new contributors can understand context easily

💬 Documentation should evolve with your system, not after it.

6. Test Across Contexts

✅ Mobile vs desktop
✅ Light vs dark themes
✅ Multilingual, accessibility, RTL layouts

💬 A component that looks great in isolation might break in the wild.

7. Celebrate Internal Adoption

✅ Shout out teams using the system well
✅ Show time saved or UI improvements
✅ Share before/after stories

💬 Adoption is emotional — not just functional.

📘 Want a Smarter Starting Point?

Sigma Design System was built to scale — with thoughtful documentation, modularity, and long-term maintenance in mind.

If you’re starting a system, don’t just build it — plan how to maintain it.