But before I do that, let’s look at the different options you have for suspending a site, and what users will see when you do each of these.<\/p>\n
Suspending Sites in Your Network – the Options<\/h2>\n
I have to admit that I find the terminology around deleting and suspending sites in a network very confusing. It’s not entirely clear what each one means and sometimes when you do one, the system will tell you that you’ve done another.<\/p>\n
So let’s have a recap on the options for removing sites from your network.<\/p>\n
Here’s a detail of the Multisite Sites screen, which you access by going to My Sites > Network Admin > Sites<\/strong>:<\/p>\n There are four options for removing the site:<\/p>\n WordPress has a default screen that it displays when a site is removed.<\/p>\n Here’s what you see in each scenario.<\/p>\n If a site is deactivated and someone other than the (logged in) network admin visits it, they’ll see a default screen:<\/p>\n If you mark a site as spam or archive it, you’ll get a different screen:<\/p>\n These screens are very basic. They don’t really give the visitor much information or explain what’s meant by ‘no longer available’ or ‘archived or suspended’.<\/p>\n So let’s create our own.<\/p>\n Note that if the site has been deleted you won’t see one of these screens – instead you’ll be taken to a 404 page in the main site.<\/em><\/p>\n Creating a new page for displaying when someone visits a deactivated site is quite straightforward. You simply create a new file called blog-deleted.php<\/em> and put it in your network’s wp-content<\/em> folder. This file will then be used to display a custom page instead of the default page.<\/p>\n Note that this is in the network’s wp-content.php<\/em> folder and so the same file will be used for any sites in your network that are deactivated. This means that you need to create something generic, rather than something specific to one site in your network.<\/p>\n Note: the title of this file is very confusing. It doesn’t apply to deleted sites, just to deactivated ones!<\/em><\/p>\n The page you create will need to stand alone – it won’t be using the site’s theme or calling any plugins or additional files. So you’ll need to either include any styling in that file or call an external stylesheet, which you would put in a styles folder in your wp-content<\/em> folder.<\/p>\n You’ll also need to include the For the sake of simplicity I’m going to create a very simple file with all the styling included in it.<\/p>\n You can start with a completely blank file if you’d like or you can copy some of the content from your theme files. For one, I’ve copied in the contents of my theme’s header.php<\/em> file and edited those down significantly, then manually added the rest of the markup.<\/p>\n Here’s the contents of my ![\"Multisite](\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/network-admin-site-settings.png\")
<\/div>\n\n
The Default Screen for Suspended Sites<\/h2>\n
Deactivated Sites<\/h3>\n
![\"deactivated](\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/deactivated-site-default.png\")
<\/div>\nArchived Sites and Sites Marked as Spam<\/h3>\n
![\"WordPress](\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/archived-site-default.png\")
<\/div>\nCreating a Page for Deactivated Sites<\/h2>\n
<head><\/code> section and the opening and closing <body><\/code> tags as these won’t be coming in via your theme’s header or footer files.<\/p>\n<head><\/code> section:<\/p>\n
![\"WordPress](\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/deactivated-site-new.png\")
<\/div>\n![\"WordPress](\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/archived-site-new.png\")
<\/div>\n