Cleaning up stale pages
When you delete or move a page, the platform normally clears the old version from your live site for you. Once in a while an old page lingers and still loads at its old address. The Clean Stale HTML button is a quick way to force that cleanup.
What is a stale page?
For speed, your live pages are served as ready-made HTML files. When you delete or move a page, that file should be removed automatically. A stale page is one of those old files that did not get cleared, so the old web address keeps loading (it returns a 200 OK response) instead of showing "not found" or redirecting.
You will usually notice this in a tool like Google Search Console, which flags pages you have already deleted or moved because they are still returning a 200. Search engines keep treating the old page, or the old location, as a live page.
When to use it
Reach for Clean Stale HTML when:
- a page you deleted still loads at its old address;
- a page you moved still loads at its old location (as well as the new one);
- Google Search Console (or another crawler) flags removed or moved pages as still present, or still returning a 200.
It is a manual nudge: normally the platform tidies these up on its own, so you only need this on the occasions when one slips through.
How to clean them up
- In the portal, open your brand and go to the About your brand tab.
- Scroll down to the Manage Sitemap section.
- Click Clean Stale HTML.
- The platform scans your brand's published pages, removes any stale ones, and reports how many it cleared (for example, "Stale HTML cleanup complete: deleted 3 of 120 scanned files.").