Retiring a Website Without Losing What It Earned

The situations

Several, with the same underlying problem.

Merging two businesses into one site. Retiring a brand or a product line. Closing a location with its own site. Consolidating domains accumulated over years. Or winding a business down entirely.

In each case a site that people link to, search engines index, and customers type is about to stop existing.

What it earned is transferable. It is just not transferable by accident.

Keep the domain

The single most important decision and the one most often got wrong.

A domain that has been live for years carries links from other sites, a position in search results, direct traffic from people who remember it, and references in printed material you cannot recall.

Letting it lapse throws all of that away, and hands the name to whoever wants it, including somebody who may use it in ways that reflect on you.

Renewal is a small annual cost against an asset that keeps working. Hold it for years, not months.

The rule of thumb worth applying: keep it as long as anything still links to it or anybody still types it, which is longer than feels necessary.

Redirect page by page

Where the value is either preserved or lost.

Pointing an entire old site at the homepage of the new one is the common approach and it loses most of the benefit. Somebody arriving from a link about a specific service lands on a general page and leaves.

Search engines also treat a mass redirect to a homepage differently from a redirect to a genuinely equivalent page.

What works: map each significant old page to its closest equivalent on the new site, and redirect individually. Where no equivalent exists, redirect to the nearest relevant section rather than the homepage.

Start with the pages that actually mattered, which your analytics and your inbound links will tell you. A small number of pages usually account for most of the value, and the long tail can go to a section.

Before you switch anything off

1. Export the content, including images, at full quality.
2. List the pages that receive traffic and the pages other sites link to.
3. Export any data, including form submissions and customer records.
4. Note every email address on the domain and where it is used.
5. Record the DNS configuration before dismantling it.
6. Take a full backup and keep it somewhere other than the hosting.

The second item is the one that informs the redirect map, and it is unavailable once the site is gone.

The email question

Frequently more urgent than the website.

Addresses on a retiring domain are in customers' address books, in accounting systems, and in accounts that send password resets.

Turning them off abruptly means mail bounces silently and you never learn what you missed.

What to do: forward to the new addresses for an extended period, tell customers directly rather than relying on them noticing, and move every account authenticating against those addresses before the change.

That last one causes the worst failures, because a password reset sent to a dead address cannot be recovered.

Telling people

The part that is not technical.

A notice on the old site before it goes, explaining what is happening and where to find you, gives regular visitors a chance to update their bookmarks.

Direct contact for customers and suppliers, since a notice on a site they visit twice a year reaches nobody.

And updating the places that point at you: the business listing, directory entries, social profiles, and anybody who links to you regularly and would update if asked.

That last one is worth an hour. A handful of relevant sites updating a link is worth more than a redirect, because a redirect is a hop and a direct link is not.

If the business is closing entirely

Different, and the domain still matters.

Keep it long enough to redirect anywhere you are pointing customers, whether that is a successor business, a partner, or a page explaining what happened.

Leaving a page up saying the business has closed, with a contact for outstanding matters, serves customers better than a dead address and costs almost nothing.

And if the name has any value, it is an asset to sell rather than abandon, which is a separate calculation covered in what your domain is worth if somebody offers.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.