Delete a page

Content has a tendency to accumulate on any website, so it’s important to have a plan to delete anything you no longer need.

Letting go

On websites, it’s best practice to get rid of anything that’s:

• Outdated

• Irrelevant

• Not getting much traffic

• Not meeting your website goals

It’s much easier to decide what to do with your content when you have clear goals for your site. If you don’t have website goals from a move to SF.gov, you should talk to your department’s leadership about what they want from the website, so you can align.

A list of all your content, also called a content audit, helps keep track of what’s out there. Ask the SF.gov support team in Digital and Data Services if you need help getting that list from Drupal.

Be ruthless

Get rid of everything you don’t need; it will give you more time and energy for what’s important!

It’s hard to get rid of pages that have taken ages to write, edit and get approved. But you will most likely never reuse that content. And a rewrite gives you a chance to make it better!

Saving webpages

Montica Levy, who’s managing Covid content for Population Health at the Department of Health, has a great system to save backups of a few top pages. Her process is:

1. Using MS Edge, save a screenshot of the page.

2. Print that screenshot as a PDF.

3. Save the PDF as a MS Word document if you need the text.

You can also use the Wayback machine to find less important pages, as it’s got an archive of the entire internet!

Managing deletions

Check the Usage tab at the top of pages in Drupal to uncover any SF.gov pages that reference the page you’re on. Redirects will catch links and any internal links will not show in the front end, but it can help future edits to clean up links in services and resource sections.

Then ask the SF.gov support team to:

1. Redirect pages you are planning on deleting

2. Delete pages for you

Email [e-mail] with the URLs and any other details, and we’ll redirect, delete, and let you know when it’s done.

Exceptions

There are a few types of content, like Meetings and News, that have a historical purpose. We need to keep, but don’t need to update, these archival pages. Check your department’s retention policy for digital content; most of these policies ask departments to keep a copy of webpages and online documents for 3 to 5 years, not forever.