Archive or delete a page – OpenCities

This task can be undertaken by users with the following roles: OC Power Publisher, OC Site Manager, and OC System Administrator.

Often, content becomes irrelevant to your community, especially pages that have dates attached to them, such as events and consultations. It's always best to remove these pages from your site so your site doesn't become cluttered. Additionally, all live pages will show in internal and external searches, which is not good for SEO. There are 2 options for removing content: archiving a page or deleting a page.

While both options will remove a page from your site tree and your live site, archiving a page will save it in an archive to be restored later. Deleting a page will remove it permanently. You might also want to keep old pages in an archive for auditing purposes.

Before you start

Before archiving or deleting pages, you must also ensure that no inbound links are pointing to the page. To check this, go to the Links tab of the page you're trying to remove. You'll need to remove any links from the page by using the Repoint Link button. This function will allow you to select another page in your site tree to redirect inbound links before archiving or deleting the page.

The repoint link button in the links tab

Please note that if a site visitor has the URL for the archived or deleted page saved anywhere, they can still use that URL, but it will be a broken link. To prevent this, a System Administrator or Site Manager can add a redirect to the URL by adding the URL of the new page into the Create URL Address field in the Settings tab of the page you're archiving or deleting. The new URL should be the same page as the page you repointed the links to.

The create URL address field in the settings tab

Archive your page

To archive a page:

Ensure all inbound links have been repointed, and you have put a new URL in the Create URL Address field in the Settings tab.
Right-click in the site tree on the page you want to archive.
Select Archive Page.
A warning will appear about what will happen to the page.
If you're sure you want to continue, select Archive.
Your page will disappear from the site tree.

If you want to see the pages you've archived, scroll to the bottom of your site tree and select Show archive content. Everything archived will be shown in its original position in the site tree. From here, you can restore a page or delete it entirely. To stop showing the archived content, scroll back to the bottom of the site tree and select Hide archived content.

Restore your page

To restore an archived page:

Scroll to the bottom of your site tree and select Show archived content. All archived pages will be shown in their original position in the site tree.
Right-click on the archived page and select Restore Page, then Confirm.
The page will be restored to your site tree, but you will need to Update and Publish the page before it goes live again.

Please note that you cannot restore a page that was permanently deleted.

Delete your page

To delete a page:

Ensure all inbound links have been repointed, and you have put a new URL in the Create URL Address field in the Settings tab.
Right-click in the site tree on the page you want to delete.
Select Delete Page.
You will see a deletion confirmation menu, which will allow you to comment on your actions on the page. Press Submit to confirm the deletion.
The page will be permanently removed from the site.

We recommend archiving pages instead of deleting them. If you delete a page, there is no way to restore the page or recover the information on it.

What else?