{"id":1545,"date":"2015-05-11T15:37:37","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T15:37:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.gov.scot\/digital\/?p=1545"},"modified":"2017-07-20T09:28:29","modified_gmt":"2017-07-20T09:28:29","slug":"introducing-simple-helpful-tool-decommissioning-websites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.gov.scot\/digital\/2015\/05\/11\/introducing-simple-helpful-tool-decommissioning-websites\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing a simple, helpful tool for decommissioning websites"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a post by <\/i>Jono Ellis<\/i><\/span><\/a>, our Social Media Manager<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Websites within the Scottish public sector portfolio that are out of date, duplicating information available elsewhere\u00a0or are\u00a0no longer maintained help sustain\u00a0a poor experience for citizens. Through working with our partners, we are spotting\u00a0candidates that display these poor attributes and are thus low hanging fruit for transitioning\u00a0to www.mygov.scot<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0This should be a seamless\u00a0process for all involved.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s important that we get our\u00a0approach to transitioning\u00a0right to ensure users have a seamless experience when moving from a legacy website to www.mygov.scot<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0Redirecting and decommissioning is the bane of many people and is usually victim to corner cutting \u2013 resulting in wildcard redirects to the homepage.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since our\u00a0team will likely have to transition\u00a0several websites\u00a0in partnership with other\u00a0teams\u00a0over the next few years, we have decided to build something that will\u00a0make life a little easier.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why is it important to\u00a0redirect legacy websites?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

We redirect old\/broken URLs for two reasons \u2013 to retain search\u00a0value (e.g. in Google)\u00a0and to\u00a0benefit our users; few things are more frustrating than discovering that the page that you are trying to find in search or via a bookmark has gone missing. Broken links don\u2019t instil trust\u00a0from users or from search engines \u2013 and since search is such an important way for users to find content on any website we\u00a0want to make sure that we handle transitioning legacy websites and URLs correctly.<\/span><\/p>\n

Building a\u00a0decommissioning tool to make\u00a0things\u00a0simpler<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019re put together the basics of a tool that will help make decommissioning easier and simpler for all involved. The tool is\u00a0available within the publishing platform and\u00a0is accessible by our team in the live environment. It\u2019s based upon the Government Digital Service (GDS) Transition Tool<\/span><\/a>, but is a much more basic first iteration that works based on\u00a0our current tech stack.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

We\u2019re following the principle of \u201cno link left behind<\/span><\/a>\u201c, one which we\u00a0picked up from\u00a0GDS cementing our efforts to avoid\u00a0serving 404s to users\u00a0where possible.<\/span><\/p>\n

The following steps are our flow for decommissioning:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Undertake appropriate user research, analytics analysis, demand analysis and begin\u00a0content creation<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Adopt a strategy for archiving, ensuring all content remains available\u00a0somewhere\u00a0for users<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Backup legacy website assets, ensuring content and code are available to those who need them<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Import a full crawl or analytics page export of the website into the decommissioning tool<\/span><\/li>\n
  5. Match\u00a0legacy pages to new pages through their URLs<\/span><\/li>\n
  6. Catch missing\u00a0URLs by using a\u00a0Chrome plugin to match legacy and new pages<\/span><\/li>\n
  7. Test the redirects by opening the highest traffic pages, as identified by Google Analytics, within our test environment<\/span><\/li>\n
  8. Move the redirects\u00a0from our test environment to the production server<\/span><\/li>\n
  9. Add the redirecting domain to our security certificates so\u00a0users don\u2019t see security warnings for secure pages<\/span><\/li>\n
  10. Change the DNS record to point to the new website so the\u00a0redirects go live<\/span><\/li>\n
  11. Test the redirects once the\u00a0DNS has propagated and make any further changes through the Chrome plugin<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    We\u2019ve also thought about ways of making the\u00a0experience less jarring for users, including the display of a message explaining why they are on www.mygov.scot<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    Our redirects script also works irrespective of\u00a0the following:<\/span><\/p>\n