Retiring a Marketing Landing Page

When a campaign ends or a page reaches its review date, the page enters review. This article covers what happens next.

Retiring a page is a decision rather than an automatic deletion. A page that reaches its end date may be extended, updated, converted to standing content or removed.

Check Traffic Before Deciding

A page that looks abandoned may still be working.

Before retiring any page, ask Web Services for its traffic over the past 12 months, including how much of it arrives from search rather than from paid placement.

A page still earning organic search traffic is ranking for something people are looking for. Removing it discards that, and rebuilding it later is considerably harder than maintaining it now. In these cases the better decision is usually to update the page rather than retire it.

A page whose traffic came almost entirely from the campaign, and which has received little since the campaign ended, is a genuine retirement candidate.

Agreement-bound pages are the exception. Where the page is tied to a sponsorship, a partnership or an athlete agreement, the agreement governs and traffic does not change the outcome. See Landing Pages for Time-Limited Agreements.

Choose the Right Outcome

Extend. The campaign is continuing. Record a new end date.

Update. The page is earning traffic but the content is out of date. Verify the provider references, the locations and the links, then reset the review date.

Convert. The page has become useful outside its campaign. Move it into the standing structure of the site, replace the Marketing Landing Page header with a standard header and remove the campaign framing.

Merge. The page is thin and its content belongs inside a larger page. Move the content, then redirect.

Retire. The page has served its purpose. Set it to Draft and redirect.

Set to Draft, Then Redirect

Do not delete the page outright. Set the page to Draft so the content remains recoverable, then create a redirect from its URL.

Choose the Redirect Target Carefully

Redirect to the most closely related live page rather than to the homepage.

A redirect to the homepage tells search engines the subject of the page no longer exists, and it gives the visitor no help finding what they were looking for. It is the least useful destination available.

In order of preference:

• The page that now covers the same subject
• The governing expertise page for that service
• The parent page, for a sub-page or an agreement-bound page
• The section index, if nothing more specific applies

Verify that the target is live and will remain live. Do not redirect to a page that is itself scheduled for retirement, which produces a redirect chain that breaks when the second page is removed.

Special Cases

A page linked from outside the site. App store listings, printed materials, QR codes, partner sites and press coverage may point to a page you are retiring, and those references cannot be updated as quickly as the redirect ships. Ask the requester where the URL has been published before retiring it.

A misspelled or malformed URL. Correct the slug and redirect the old URL rather than leaving both live.

A page excluded from the sitemap. These will not appear in inventories or audits, so they are easy to overlook during cleanup. If the page was excluded deliberately, record why. If not, correct it.

After Retirement

Confirm the redirect resolves. Monitor Search Console for coverage errors over the following weeks.

Remove the page from the AI Wayfinding index and add the redirect target if it is not already listed.

Record the retirement so the page is not rebuilt from scratch when a similar campaign comes around.