Freezing and Deleting Inactive Sites With Legal Exceptions
After a merger, 75 sites in a factory have had no content edits or traffic above 50 visits/month for 18 months. The governance policy says inactive sites should be frozen after 12 months and deleted after 24 months, but deletion requires legal and finance sign-off. One inactive site is named in a litigation hold; another has an active domain used only for email redirects. The platform team wants to reclaim database and file storage before next fiscal year. Site owners are unresponsive.
1. Classify the 75 sites and recommend the first lifecycle action.
Read the worked answer
Reasoning: The policy threshold has passed, but deletion is not the first step. Freezing is reversible and reduces risk while evidence is gathered.
- Freeze the 75 sites as read-only so content and files remain available but cannot change.
- Remove the litigation-hold site from the deletion pipeline; preserve it and its backups until legal releases the hold.
- Treat the email-redirect site separately: it may not need a full website, but its domain must keep resolving.
- Group the sites by owner, business unit, and contractual obligation; unresponsive owners are a documentation problem, not automatic deletion authority.
- Record the freeze date because it starts the deletion-eligibility clock under the policy.
2. What evidence and approvals are needed before deleting any site?
Read the worked answer
Reasoning: Deletion is destructive and requires both policy eligibility and business/legal clearance.
- Confirm the site has been frozen for the required period and that no litigation, audit, or contractual hold applies.
- Send notice to the recorded owner and business unit, with a defined response window.
- Obtain legal and finance sign-off as required by policy.
- Confirm backups and retention obligations, including whether deleted-site backups must be kept and for how long.
- Check domains, redirects, and integrations so deletion does not break email, SSO, or vanity URLs.
- Document the decision in a deletion register before executing.
3. How should the email-redirect site be handled without keeping a full site?
Read the worked answer
Reasoning: The business need is domain resolution and email routing, not a Drupal site with database and files.
- Confirm which addresses and paths must continue to work, and for how long.
- Move the redirect to DNS or an edge/redirect service so the domain no longer depends on the Site Factory site.
- Preserve any required content export or archive, then delete the site after approvals.
- Verify email delivery and HTTP redirects after the change, and document the new owner of the domain.