Delete, Unpublish, Archive Last Updated May 2025 Consider carefully when removing content from your website: Deleting a page is immediate and permanent. Removing the content may affect Inbound links & Search indexing. Compliance with Records Retention. When removing the content from search results is a priority while also complying with records retention, follow the Recommended Process for Removing Content, below. Deleting content is only recommended for content that was never “live” or has been unpublished in compliance with records retention policies. If something is accidentally deleted, you will have to recreate it and may wish to copy it from the Test website. On this page: User role permissions Deleted Pages Showing in Search Results Recommended Process for Removing Content & Keeping a Record How To User Role Permissions All content editors can Unpublish/Archive any content. Editors with the Content Contributor User Role can only Delete content they created. Most of our main content editors have the Content Administrator User Role and can Unpublish and Delete any content. Learn more about Editor Access, Approvals & Roles Deleted Pages Showing in Search Results Google and other search engines, will take a while before they re-index the site so the Universal Resource Locator (URL) path for a page may still show up in search results. Google will keep indexing a page that is Unpublished longer than if the page is Deleted. As long as it is not cached, visitors to a URL of a Deleted page will see the Page Not Found page. If it is Unpublished, visitors will see the Access Denied page. Google sees a code in the header. On the Page Not Found page the code is “404 Not Found” on the Access Denied page the code is “403 Forbidden.” Recommended Process for Removing Content & Keeping a Record If a record of the content is needed: Clone the page. This will generate a new Unpublished page with a new URL address that search engines have never seen. Then Delete the original version. Also, take care when deleting media, document or image files, from the Media Library. Automated backups are saved weekly and monthly as compressed copies of the database. The monthly snapshots for each year are stored annually. A compressed copy of the files is also saved annually. Please read more about automated backups. How To There are several places in the interface where you can find options to Clone, Unpublish and Delete: To Clone navigate to the page, and use the “Clone” tab. On the “Edit” tab for all content types and the “Layout” tab for content types with Layout Builder, you will find a drop-down to change the current state. You can also find the page in the “Existing Content List” link from the Dashboard. Then, in the “Operations” column, click the arrow next to “Edit” and you’ll see the option to Clone or Delete the page. Remember, if you delete it will be as if the page never existed.
