Closing down website – Best way?

@MaartenltFeb 18.2016

Hi,

We have a company that has been taken over by another bigger company. Now they want to shut down the smaller company’s website so everything is grouped on 1 big website. The thing is the clients of the smaller company don’t know the mother company so we have to create an informative landing page saying ‘~~[I]~~Hey visitor, we have been taken over by …, please visit ~~[U]~~this website[/U] from now on to contact us[/I]“.

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My question now is how do you do this the best way? Create 1 HTML page as index and redirect all the existing URL’s to this page? And it’s not bad that you suddenly change your whole website to 1 page?

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What about 301 permanent redirection codes where we would redirect existing URL’s from the old website to the new website? Although it’s not a new website of the company, its a whole other website. What about SEO?

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And the people that would Google the company and still find an indexed URL, and click on it, they should be redirected to the home landing page?

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Should you still care about SEO Google rating when your website is closing down?

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Thank you very much,

Maarten

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6 Comments(s) _↴

@NogDogFeb 18.2016 — #Just thinking out loud here, so to speak....

If there is a one-to-one relationship between pages on your site and pages on the new site, it would be nice to have them each do permanent redirects to their respective new pages, at least for SEO purposes. If not, my first instinct would be to set up .htaccess or whatever to redirect them to one page on the old site (or maybe even the new site?) that announces the change, which then does a meta redirect after X seconds to the desired home page on the new site (with the usual "if your browser does not automatically redirect, click this link" sort of thing).

@rootFeb 18.2016 — #Thinking out loud here also...

Apart from the obvious knee jerk cost savings, why do they want to shut down a website that has a client base already established and have the new owners considered the problems that it creates for the current clients and do the clients want to migrate to the new company abruptly?

There is a lack of consideration by bigger companies when the swallow up smaller companies, the take over needed be an instant shut down, the takeover will lose customers for sure and a quick shut down will lose more customers on top of that,

There is nothing wrong in the company wanting to shut the website down, however a staged and more gentle approach may be a better idea and give people who have bookmarks the chance to update their bookmarks.

One alternative that is overlooked is sharing a namespace, having the URL imported in to the new owners existing namespace and have that old site completely transplanted with all resources and then slowly turn each page in to a redirect page to the new resource location.

What you don't want to do is alienate the current user base and if you have an email list, a courteous email announcing the take over merger and where people can find the new resources that they have been accustomed to.

I can base this on actually being in a company that took on another company and they lost over night best part of 40% of its customer base because new clients didn't like dealing with the new company and wanted to trade still with the old company and eventually lost out to a rival, they alienated another 16% of the new customer base because the change over was very abrupt. So in the long run, had they kept the old company running as suggested by the old MD, the new company would have retained at least 36% of the base that just walked.

The question is, how much moolar are we talking, £100k's or millions that could be potentially lost? How much are the bigger company prepared to lose or retain?

@NogDogFeb 18.2016 — #^{^^{^}} good thoughts ?

@cbVisionFeb 18.2016 — #I actually just went through an identical process, having to merge 3 similar websites into one giant new brand.

As NogDog said, SEO is important to maintain, so you'll want to maintain that juice by using some 301 redirects pointing the old pages to the new pages on the new site. If pages aren't being migrated or there's no need for them on the new site, then redirecting those to the homepage is fine.

For people coming directly to the URL or the homepage (instead of a specific page), we sent them to a landing page that said "This site is now part of blah blah blah, here are the advantages, blah blah blah," with a big CTA to take them to the new site.

Traffic coming to a specific page through the 301 redirects, I decided not to send them to this landing page, but instead include a message at the top of the page saying "It looks like you were trying to access www.oldsite.com/whatever/. That company is now part of newsite." This way, they get directly to the content they were looking for, but we still give them the message to help avoid confusion. It also keeps the SEO juice instead of sending that juice to a generic landing page.

Good luck!

@MaartenltauthorFeb 19.2016 — #Wow, thanks for all the out-loud-thoughts, really helpful. I also didn't like the idea of abruptly shutting down a website like that, even if the main-client asked for it.

I think this is how we will propose the shutdown:
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[*]First we will create a big overlay banner with the message saying the website will shutdown within a month or so and they can find them on the new website with indeed a big CTA to the new website. They can click the message away and still go to the current website.

[*]After the month we wil create a landing page with the message the website has been shut down and they can go to the new website. On the backend we will create as many 301 links as possible to the new website to not lose SEO. All People that are redirected like this, we will indeed show them a small message on the new website saying this is the news website bla bla. All pages that don't have a direct copy on the new website will be redirected to the home-landing-page of the old website.

[*]After a couple of months like this I think it is safe to then shut down the website entirely.

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Is it needed to redirect the home page of the old website to the new one at any point? Or simply shut it down after a couple of months?

Any comments or improvement propositions on this procedure are always welcome!

@rootFeb 19.2016 — #How long is the domain name left before expiry?

I suggest that you try to utilize the expiry date as final cut off, whilst closing down you last move IMHO should be to import the domain name in to the new owners namespace with a redirect on the new site location, That way any residual web tracks can be mopped up and they will only need to pay a small fee for unlocking and the transferral the domain name.

When the domain is up for renewal you can safely drop it.