Replace or Remove Default Content

Your Stanford site comes pre-built with some default content. This default content is there to give you ideas about what to put on your site and to help you understand how to use your site. 

Just as you take the training wheels off of a bicycle after you learn to ride, on your Stanford Site, you'll want to replace or remove any default content before you launch your site. Although pages with default content may not be part of your navigation and menu, these example pages will show up in search results and affect SEO, so it is important to delete or unpublish anything you are not using.

Replace default content

There are pages that just about every site will have. These include your "Home" page and your "About" page. For any pages you want to keep, you can delete the sample content and replace it with your own. We hope this helps you get started with sitebuilding quickly!

The site also comes with default taxonomy to help you group your content together. You can use some or all of these tags, rename them, or delete them.

Remove default content

For content that you won't need on your site, you can either delete or unpublish the content. Here are our recommendations for sample content you do not intend to use:

Events, News, People, Courses, Publications

Unpublish unneeded list pages

The site comes with several Filtered List Pages that are designed to work with our structured content types (News, Events, People, Publications, and Courses.) The filters rely on taxonomy for each content type. 

We recommend that if you do not wish to use the pages, you unpublish them and remove them from the menu. Deleting them will make it harder for you to use the filter functionality later if you wish to do so. If you want to make new list pages without the filter, there are directions for doing so in the guide page for each type of filtered list page.

Delete unneeded taxonomy terms

In addition to unpublishing the page, you should also delete the taxonomy terms (categories) for each content type. Each term creates a page that could appear in Google Search. Learn more about deleting taxonomy terms on the Taxonomy page.

Delete sample person and news items

The site comes with several sample news items and a sample person record. This is so you can see how the Lists Paragraph and Filtered List Pages features work. We recommend you delete these.

Keep "Access Denied" and "Page Not Found" pages

The site also comes with two pages that contain important functionality for the usability of your site. Do not remove these pages.  You can learn more about the pages and their purpose on our Access Denied/Page Not Found guide.