Renaming, re-homing, archiving, and deleting a site

Where these controls live

All four controls are on the site's Settings tab. The domain is in the Install panel, beside the verification it resets. The name is under Name and organization. Archiving and deleting are in the last card. They aren't equals, and the page doesn't present them as equals. A rename changes a label, a domain change moves your evidence to a new address, archiving stops the billing, and deleting destroys the record. The most important thing to remember is to archive a site when a client relationship ends. Delete only when you mean to erase the evidence.

What does renaming a site change?

Only the label. The site name is there for you and your team, and it doesn't appear anywhere else. Renaming doesn't change the domain, the site key, the snippet on the page, the bill, or any scan or consent record, so you can rename a site whenever you like.

How do you move a site to a new domain?

When a client rebrands or a site graduates from a staging domain to the real one, change the site's domain. Deleting the site and adding a new one throws away the consent log, and changing the domain keeps it.

Your history is attached to the site, so consent records, scan history and the cookie inventory stay where they are and stay continuous when the domain changes. The snippet keeps working too, as long as that same snippet is installed on the new domain, because it's keyed by the site key, which doesn't change. You can paste a full URL into the domain field, and UserGuard stores the bare hostname. An account can't hold the same domain twice.

Two things need your attention afterward:

• Install verification resets. Verification applied to the old domain, so the site shows as not installed until the script is seen answering from the new domain. After that, the Live, Quiet and Silent health states described in Installing the UserGuard snippet resume.
• Published documents go stale. Generated documents are frozen HTML, and their text names the old domain. They don't update on their own, so they keep naming the old domain until you publish them again from the Documents tab. Fix the cookie policy first, since it would otherwise name a domain the site no longer uses.

Archiving stops the bill and keeps the record

Archive a site when you no longer work with the client. Archiving stops everything that costs you money or attention and keeps everything the site has ever recorded.

What stops:

• Billing. Your bill counts live sites, and an archived site isn't one. The subscription adjusts when you archive, prorated mid-cycle without waiting for the next invoice. Volume pricing follows the live count, so the per-site rate can change too.
• Scheduled scans. The scheduler skips archived sites.
• Attention items. An archived site stops showing up for review, and it leaves the default sites list. The Archived filter shows it when you want it.

The script doesn't stop. An archived site keeps serving its published banner, and consent keeps being recorded, because archiving changes your account and does nothing to the visitor's page. The app says so once a site is archived. If you want the banner gone, remove the snippet from the page too.

You can reverse archiving. Restore the site and billing picks it back up, with nothing lost in between.

Deleting is permanent, and it takes the consent log

Deleting a site destroys everything recorded for it: the scans and their page-by-page evidence, the cookie inventory, the published banner configurations, the generated documents, and the consent log. There's no undo and no recovery window.

You can rebuild most of that list. A rescan will find your cookies again, for example. You can't rebuild the consent log. A consent record is the proof that a specific visitor was asked and what they answered, and once it's gone, nothing can reconstruct it. That's why the confirmation asks you to type the site's domain instead of a stock word. People type "DELETE" out of reflex, but typing the domain means you looked at which site this is.

Keeping that log doesn't make you compliant by itself, and nothing does. But if you delete it, you can no longer show what the site did while it ran. How long you should keep consent records after a relationship ends is a question for your counsel. If you archive, the answer never has to be "we deleted them." Archiving stops the billing just as well, which is why the app offers it first.

Who can do which

Renaming a site, changing its domain and archiving it all take an admin. Deleting is owner-only. The roles follow the consequences. You can undo a rename or an archive in a click, while erasing the evidence is a decision for the account owner.