The Pew Research Center made an interesting experiment. They checked on more than a million web pages that had been online 10 years earlier and found that 38% of them were no longer online. As they looked deeper into this digital decay, they found that 23% of all webpages had broken links — that is, they linked to pages that were no longer online. Most of the pages had previously been at websites which were still online, with a smaller number belonging to websites which no longer existed. That’s a lot of people choosing to remove their content from the web. If you’re thinking of shutting down your website, there are some issues to consider first.
Shutting down your website when you shut down your business
If your website supports your business and you shut down your business, shutting down your website makes sense. If you’re a dentist and you’re ready to retire and close your practice, you can close up your website without qualms. You might choose to preserve your content — for example, if you’ve been blogging for years and your website is a compendium of useful information on dental hygiene and health, you could download your blog posts and turn them into a book.
You could also preserve your site online in order to keep your content available for users. If you’re still willing to pay for your domain name, you could move to free hosting, change your homepage so that it no longer mentions a business, and abandon the site without removing it. This will prevent unfortunate consequences like having someone hijack your domain name and use it for nefarious purposes. It also maintains the value of the domain in case you want to use it again in the future.
Replacing your website
A different situation arises if you change your business enough that you need to replace your website. For example, we recently built a website for a business owner who was moving, opening a new physical shop, and changing the name of the business. He decided to use most of the content from the old site on the new site. In order for the new site to rank well with Google, he had to remove the old site.
Sometimes it makes sense to redirect your old URL to the new URL for your new website. If our hypothetical dentist is not retiring but moving to a new town, her old customers probably won’t want to follow her to her new location, so redirecting the URL won’t benefit her old patients or her new dental practice. However, if you have an ecommerce site, redirecting can help old customers find your new business and might give you a jumpstart.
Giving up the website
We have heard of people deciding that a website isn’t worth the time and trouble of keeping it up. Imagine a therapist who currently has plenty of clients. He doesn’t like working on his website and doesn’t feel that he needs it, so he decides to shut it down, figuring that he can always start it back up in the future if he needs more clients someday.
The problem is that restarting a website after it has been removed from the web is not that easy. If he doesn’t continue paying for the domain, someone else can get control of it. If he keeps the domain but it doesn’t have a website associated with it, it will lose all the SEO traction it had developed. Links to the domain from other websites will be broken and are likely to be removed from those other web pages. If our hypothetical therapist decides to revive the website, he will have to work to get it indexed again and to build up traffic from scratch.
Shutting down your website should never be something you plan to do temporarily. Instead, determine the actual investment of time and money, reduce it as much as possible, and let your website stay online until you are certain you will never want to use it again.
If you are thinking about shutting down your website, talk with us first. We may be able to simplify your maintenance and make the website do more for your business — so that it becomes worth your while.
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