Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) offices should review and maintain their online content throughout the year. This technical maintenance and content maintenance. Websites that are no longer being maintained should be archived.

Required Website Maintenance Tasks

All EERE websites need to be reviewed periodically. Offices should ensure that they:

  1. Perform ongoing content maintenance.
    • Quarterly: Technical Maintenance. Complete the tasks listed under "Technical Web Maintenance" each quarter.
    • Annually: Content Analysis. Identify content that needs to be updated, and then add, remove, and edit content throughout the year.
  2. 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.

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.

Evaluate Your Redirects

Contact your AFS contact to get your office's list of redirects. Retire them when they are no longer needed. See the Domains, URLs, and Redirects page for more information.

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.

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 content management system (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.

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 web template coordinator.

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 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.