Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) offices should review and maintain their online content throughout the year in order to ensure that it is relevant and timely to users. Webpages that are no longer being maintained or content that is no longer relevant should be archived.
Required Website Maintenance Tasks
All EERE websites need to be reviewed periodically. Offices should ensure that they:
- Perform ongoing content maintenance.
- Complete the tasks listed under "Technical Web Maintenance" each quarter.
- Complete content analysis on an annual basis. Identify content that needs to be updated, and then add, remove, and edit content throughout the year.
- Complete website maintenance reports twice a year and submit them to the Web Governance Team.
Technical Web Maintenance
Technical maintenance is the process of ensuring your website functions properly, whether it is within the Energy.gov content management system (CMS) or an external site. Follow these requirements to make sure your website is working as intended:
Ensure Pages and Files are Section 508-compliant
Identify accessibility issues on your pages and uploaded files and take steps to correct any issues. All files, regardless of format, should be Section 508 compliant.
Check to Make Sure Pages are Mobile-friendly
Ensure that your pages display and perform well at all viewing sizes, both on desktop and mobile platforms. If not, make corrections to your page's layout as necessary. Remember that most elements on an Energy.gov page (such as images, videos or breakout boxes) will stack on top of each order when viewed on a mobile platform.
Evaluate Your Redirects
Contact your AFS contact to get your office's list of redirects. Retire redirects when they are no longer needed. See the Domains, URLs, and Redirects page for more information.
Check for Unvisited Pages and Orphaned Files
Use Google Analytics reporting and your CMS sitemap to determine if there are any pages that are not receiving pageviews. If possible, consider merging important content from unvisited pages into higher traffic pages.
Check for files on the server that are not linked from anywhere, and coordinate with your office communications leads on which files should be archived or moved. EERE publications with scientific information should be checked to make sure they are also uploaded into OSTI E-Link, and all decisions on archiving or removing content should comply with federal records requirements and the Freedom of Information Act.
Reduce Page Weight
Complex web pages can bog down website loading times, and search engines will penalize pages and websites that load slowly. Slimming down pages by optimizing images for the web, as well as removing unnecessary scripts from a page, will help search engine optimization.
Additionally, consider how many interactive elements—such as interactive maps, charts and accordion sections—you are using on your pages; the more interactive elements your page contains, the slower it may load. Consider removing unneeded interactive elements or placing content on a separate page if your page is loading slowly. Various tools are available online to help with testing page loading speeds.
Web Content Maintenance
Content maintenance is the process of reviewing and improving website content. EERE expects each office to do a content analysis of its website(s) every year, if possible.
Content maintenance plans should also clarify roles and responsibilities for content on your site and the steps to take as part of your content inventory process.
Run Link Scans
Run link scans to identify broken and redirecting links. You can use tools such as EERE's SiteImprove account to identify broken links on your website.
Some content is date-specific, but would not be appropriate to update with new links and content over time. For example, old news stories may link to websites that have since been retired, but should not have their content or links updated. In this case, remove the broken links entirely.
Check for Misspellings
Using SiteImprove or similar tools, check your pages for misspellings and correct them. Double-check spellings of names, external partners, etc., to remove false positives in SiteImprove.
Identify and Update Stale Content
As part of content analysis, identify pages that have not been updated in more than a year. Work with your communications team on at least an annual basis to determine which content should be updated, and what updates should be made to your content.
Updating your content is also an opportunity to improve search engine optimization (SEO) by adding keywords and internal crosslinks to content.
Review Tags and Metadata
As part of the maintenance process, review the tags and metadata on each page being inventoried. Update summaries that are inaccurate or out of date. Tags should be appropriate for the webpage's content; summaries should offer users a succinct preview of the page or article's content, as they will also be displayed in search engine results below the link to the webpage.
Ensure Proper Content Governance Settings for Pages
Review the content governance settings for pages and articles on your site, as well as any auto-generated content governance reports. If a page is approaching its expiration date and you would like to keep it from being archived, update the expiration date for your page.
There are three types of content within Energy.gov:
Statutorily Required – content that should be retained for legal or policy reasons. Keep live in the CMS for at least three years, then retire.
- Example: Budget documents
Temporary - content that does not need to remain on the site indefinitely. Temporary content will be unpublished once it passes the expiration date that is set for it upon creation. Temporary nodes should have an expiration date set for less than a year from the publish date.
- Example: Events
Evergreen with Periodic Updates – content that should be retained indefinitely but needs to be maintained.
- Example: Contact Us page; news articles
When a new webpage is created, the expected lifespan of the page must be determined so that one of these designations can be assigned. A standard lifespan for a web page is three years.
Web Maintenance Planning and Reporting
In June and December, Web Coordinators will be asked to submit completed Web maintenance reports to the Web Governance Team Facilitator. These will explain the work you've done throughout the year and your future plans for each website.
Website Archiving
Once your website has completed its intended purpose, you should archive it.
Determine If Redirects Are Needed
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 webpage.
Remove EERE Links to Archived Websites
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 node link (ex., node/1246091/) that leads to the to-be-archived page. You can then remove these internal links before proceeding with archiving the page. This process will not show any links made using the full URL (ex., https://www.energy.gov/eere/communicationstandards/web-maintenance-requirements).
After the website is archived, you can use tools such as SiteImprove to identify any broken links that remain 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.
Identify Links from External Websites to Archived Websites
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 EERE Digital Team.
Archive Your Website
When you're done with the above steps, unpublish your website in Energy.gov or—if your website is not in the Energy.gov 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 you are unpublishing content that appears in your site's navigation menu, contact CMS Support for assistance. Unpublishing navigation-linked content will cause the link to change to "Inaccessible" in the navigation menu.