Deleting a Page

There will be times when an page needs to be removed from AEM, and you will need to follow the steps below to correctly delete the page from the platform. Otherwise, issues could arise from deleting the page.

Unpublishing the Page is the first step to what is known as the "Scream Test."

In short, a Scream Test is the process where we will soft-remove (Unpublish) an asset or page in order to determine ownership and/or use-case of content. This occurs by waiting for any sort of contact (IE: calls, email, anything) regarding the disappearance of the item in question. Depending on the content being deleted, a period of time may be required for the Scream Test in order to determine if the item may in fact be deleted without repercussions. If content is pertinent, likely the test will succeed the same day, sometimes within hours or even minutes, depending on content unpublished.

The point in this is, if a user makes contact to complain about something missing, it is only a few clicks to get the content back in a timely manner, simply by Publishing the item again.

Once the user-determined period of time has elapsed for the Scream Test and no users have complained about the missing page/asset, then it is time to actually delete the physical data for the asset or page in question. The Scream Test may be skipped if the data already has verified-ownership and request to remove/delete comes from them directly.

Before we delete the physical data for the page, we want to ensure there are no other pages linking to the page to be deleted. We do this by checking the References for the page.

To check references, switch the left panel view from Content Only to References.

Once you see the Reference pane, hard-select a page to see reference details of that item. Language copies will almost always have a reference, as it is a direct reference to the only item that exists. What we want to ensure, is that the Incoming Links are properly cleared before deleting the page.

Click on Incoming Links to bring up the reference list of links. You may click on individual pages and then Edit. This opens the page directly and you may then adjust links on those pages.

Once all references are cleared, we may then move on to deleting the page entirely. 

Hard-select the desired page and click on Delete.

A prompt will appear asking if the user would like to archive the page before deletion. WCM highly recommends making sure this box is checked before deleting.  Archiving pages prior to deletion will allow you to restore the page, should it be needed in the future.

To finalize deleting the page, click Delete.