How to shut dow old site hosted on wordpress.com

  • Unknown's avatar
    cliffcourt123 · Member ·

    I am a committee member of a residents association. There is a very old wordpress.com-hosted site that was created back in 2012 for the association, that has not been maintained. We’ve recently purchased a new domain and deployed a new official site for the association, but now wish to remove the old wordpress.com-hosted site, as being so old, it is coming up ahead of our new site on Google, which causes confusion for those looking for it.

    Unfortunately, the person who developed the site has passed away, and so we have no way to get into the site to shut it down or re-direct to the new site.

    So because I can’t seem to reach anyone directly at wordpress.com, I’d like to ask forum members if they aware of a mechanism for handling such a situation?

    We will take steps to get our new site up the Google rankings with SEO etc, but this will take some time. So we’d like the old site removed sooner rather than later.

    Many thanks in advance

  • Unknown's avatar
    sajjadisbrilliant · Member ·

    Hey, I completely understand how confusing it can be when an outdated site continues to show up in search results—especially when you’ve launched a new, official one. I’m here to help with the next steps.

    If you are unable to regain access to the website, we can help by making the site private so that search engines and the public can’t access it. This can help eliminate confusion while your new site gains visibility.

    A few important notes:

    • If the site is set to private but still appears in Google search results, it may take some time for those results to drop naturally.
    • You can speed this up by submitting a removal request through the website removal request tool. 

    Could you please share the old site’s URL with us? Once we have it, we can take the next steps to make it private.

  • Unknown's avatar
    cliffcourt123 · Member ·

    Good Day sajjadisbrilliant

    Many thanks for the quick reply.

    The URL is question is: https://tokairesidentsassociation.wordpress.com/

    Kind regards

    Cliff

  • desnum · Staff ·

    Hi Cliff, we reviewed the details, and the site is now set to private. If you have any questions while setting up the new site, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

  • The topic ‘How to shut dow old site hosted on wordpress.com’ is closed to new replies.