Why it's important to remove old content
- Search engines may rank an old page with outdated content above a newer page with current content.
- Artificial intelligence tools might pull outdated or incorrect information from your site and misinform users.
- Some work may be required to keep outdated content aligned with evolving standards and best practices.
- Though you may have reasons to keep an archive鈥攆or example, as a record of past events鈥攜our visitors won't necessarily understand the details aren't current.聽Bloating your site with old, low traffic content can also make your more important content harder to find.
How to archive old content
WMS revisions
Every time you edit and save your webpages, the WMS聽 automatically generates an archived version of your old content called a revision. You can view and restore revisions by logging into your site, accessing a webpage, and clicking the moderate tab. This will allow you to view or revert to (that is, republish) any revision of your webpage since your page was created.
This means there's no need to worry about what could happen if you need information that's been deleted from a page. You'll always have the option to view and share past revisions. You can even republish old content if necessary.
... but what if an entire webpage, or even a complete website, needs to be deleted?
How to make a back-up copy of a web page or website
There are many options that can be used to create archived versions of webpages and websites that you can store in your local files.
- Saving an offline version of a webpage:聽The simplest way to create a local copy of a webpage is to go to the File menu in your browser and select the Save page as option. Storing archived versions of pages in SharePoint will ensure they're accessible to everyone on your team.
- The Wayback Machine:聽The Internet Archive鈥檚 is a non-profit, online library of websites and other digital artifacts. To archive a webpage, go to the , and enter the URL into the Save Page Now field click the Save page button. The Wayback Machine occasionally archives webpages without being prompted. If you accidentally delete a page that you need to restore, you might check to see if an archived version of the page exists in the Wayback machine.
- OneNote Web Clipper:聽OneNote Web Clipper works with most web browsers and can be used to easily capture, edit, annotate, and share web pages. You can learn more about .
- Archiving an entire website: If you want to make an archive of your entire website (before doing a major redesign or deleting the site altogether, for example), you can ask us to add the current version of your site to the on Archive It. Learn more about archiving your entire site.
Now that you know how to archive (and delete!) old web content you're all set to make a clean sweep! Think of how much easier it'll be to manage your website!
