You should archive an Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) website or application when it no longer serves a purpose. Follow these guidelines for archiving.

When a site is removed from the server, future visitors will see a "page not found" or "access denied" error when they visit the old URL. If you want your users to be redirected to other content, set up a redirect.

For more information, see the Domains, URLs, and Redirects page.

Remove links on EERE web pages that point to the archived website. You should make an effort to remove links from web pages that you already manage, and to contact any offices that are likely to be linking to your website.

To see what pages link to your archived page from within the Energy.gov CMS, navigate to the page you intend to remove and click the Usage tab. This tab will show which pages within the Energy.gov CMS use a link that leads to the to-be-archived page. You can then remove these internal links before proceeding with archiving the page.

After the website is archived, you can use tools such as SiteImprove to identify broken links on your website.

If the website you are going to archive has its own dedicated Google Analytics profile, you may be able to find internal links under Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals. Click on "Energy.gov" to see the internal links to your site.

This step is optional. You can use Google Analytics to see if your website is getting a lot of traffic from external websites. You can contact these external websites and ask them to update their links. To learn how to use Google Analytics to identify who's linking to you, please contact the Web Template Coordinator.

When you're done with the above steps, unpublish your website in Energy.gov or—if your website is not in the Energy.gov content management system (CMS)—tell your developer to take the website down. If you are using redirects or bookmarks, these should be turned on at the same time.

You can retire a website on Energy.gov in two ways:

• Manually: Open every page of your website in the Energy.gov CMS and unpublish it. This works best for small websites.
  • To archive pages, click on the Edit tab, then scroll to the bottom and select "Archived" from the Change To pulldown menu. You will then be asked to check a box acknowledging that the archived content will not be available. This box must be checked or the page will not be archived.
• By contacting DOE Public Affairs: Public Affairs can unpublish a large number of pages in bulk. If you're retiring an entire nested group, Public Affairs staff can unpublish all of the pages at once. If not, you can send Public Affairs the Node IDs of every page you want unpublished.

The unpublished pages will remain on Energy.gov and will be available if you need to access the content in the future. However, if you delete an entire nested group and do not intend to use it in the future, ask Public Affairs to delete the nested group. They can move the content to another location (such as another one of your nested groups) if you need access to the content in the future.

If your archived website had a statistics profile, contact the EERE Web Template Coordinator and ask to archive it. If you need historical backups of your statistics, tell the EERE Web Template Coordinator.