Tip of the Month: Unpublishing BEFORE deleting, renaming or moving.

Make sure you unpublish any content including images, files, pages, folders, etc. PRIOR to deleting, renaming or moving . If this action is not taken, it will create “orphaned” pages or images on the website. The reason for this is there are two servers – one server hosts the content management system(CMS), the other server hosts the actual website. Changes are made to the “copy” contained within the content management system and THEN when published, the server copies the updated page to the web server. The only means for the user to remove a page from the webserver is to unpublish the page.

1. Deleting page: If a page (or image, folder, or some other type of content) is not unpublished prior to deleting, the old page is “orphaned” on the web server, meaning that the page will be left on the web server and a copy will not remain in the CMS for you to edit.
2. Renaming page: If you rename the page(or image, folder, or some other type of content) from within the CMS without unpublishing, the original page will be remain on the web server and when you rename the page within the CMS and publish it, it will then have the original page and the new renamed page on the web server. By having two pages, search engines will “crawl” both pages and place within the search engine database both pages with the content. If you update your second copy of the page, the first copy will not be updated, thus providing old content to search engines and frustrating the user as they are unsure as to which content is correct and most recent.

Hopefully, this explanation will clear any confusion on unpublishing, renaming and deleting content from the CMS. And as always, if you have any questions about the CMS or digital marketing, feel free to contact us.