Some projects, campaigns, brands and sadly professional careers end. I am happy to say 99% of my folks will pivot to a new site/project. But from time to time sites need to be decommissioned. That is today’s topic.

Make a List!

It is a good idea most of the time, but here it is a must, paper, docs whatever works, but you will have a lot of moving parts to manage and a check list of sorts. It will get shorter and shorter :)

Hosting

The hosting is where it all lives, I would plan to cancel at least 30 days before the final contract. A few things to do/check/watch out for:

• Backup via the file manager or FTP, find your public_html folder or where ever the site is, zip it then backup and download it
• Backup via WordPress, there are multiple options for this, XML exports etc
• Backup the daatbase separately via PHPMyAdmin or whatever admin you have for the DB
  • Plan a time to delete everything, not somethings, everything from all of the above then leave the account literally empty, this is the same logic for all third party accounts
  • Many vendors now never delete user data, your account goes into a “Inactive” state, if this is the case change your email to john@doe.com or something made up that will pass validation and move on
• Most nice companies will kindly help you delete, but many folks see the nasty side of hosts as they are leaving as customers

DNS & Email

After hosting services are decommissioned you may or may not need to admin the DNS, this should be still possible via the host if you purchased a domain from them. But without hosting you can be in a place where things like SSL wont work. Once you can park a domain you can do a lot with it.

If you want to literally disappear then you can just clear your DNS and the domain is owned but not live or connected to anything.

If your email was on the web hosting this is a failure all up, but equally no one should be keeping old emails in this context anyway, that data is not yours to hoard for later projects/leads etc. GDPR dont forget it.

Domains

Most ccTLDs are worthless, it is at this point most folks start to see this. Any .ie or .co.uk domains you can buy and sell trade, but they are not legally saleable. It happens, but its not a thing I will promote.

If you have a .com then you are in another world, some can sell from $3,000-$30,000, there will be many fees on this, taxes, intermediaries etc. But a person can cash out a domain. Do not let domains expire if they are decade old .com. But your .ie and .co.uk etc are as I said worthless, let them go. Let the next person have them, but more likely you will see your local ‘friendly’ domain sellers cannibalize the domain, most of the time the folks you buy from locally are the squatters also.

SEO/Google

Google will pretty quickly scrub you from the net once it sees dead DNS for a prolonged period. But if you want to control this you can simply do a ‘/’ removal via GSC, or Google Search Console as you can see below. Do this then come back a few days later and do it again, as with all things Google the first time may not take. The GSC backend is one of the most broken pieces of software out there, but for removing things Google are quick, relative to indexing.

You can easily check this by searching for site:domain.com with your domain, and you will see all the listings Google has, same for Bing/Yahoo, Baidu etc.

There is a remove URL requester on every Search Engine and remove all is always an option, this in my experience is a good idea on the last day. It will start a cascade where any links to you now break, both in SERPs and from your old server. Google will erase you very quickly, which can be sad but its the whole idea of moving on.

Don’t Get Over Charged!

Cancel anything you do no need that day, make sure you also remove any payment sources from your accounts before hand too. But also do not cancel things before you are finished or before you backup. The last thing you need is cost, but you can also make a lot of profit as you decommission a business, primarily selling domains so if you need a pro who has done this many times, give me a shout.