Deleting Is Now a Deliberate Act, Not a Mis-Click
A small change with an outsized effect: deleting a page from your actor website now requires you to mean it, and the admin offers to hide the page instead, because hiding is what people almost always actually want.
What went wrong before
The delete control sat next to the edit control. Both were small. On a phone, with a thumb, they were roughly the same target. There was a confirmation, but it was the kind of confirmation you dismiss without reading because you have dismissed forty of them that week.
The pages that got lost this way were rarely the important ones. They were the ones somebody had spent an hour writing and had not looked at since, which is arguably worse, because nobody noticed for months.
What happens now
- Delete has moved out of the row and into the page's own settings, so you cannot reach it while scanning a list.
- The confirmation names the page and tells you what it contains: how many words, how many images.
- Hiding is presented as the first option, with deleting underneath it.
- Standard pages that hold your data, such as your credits or galleries, cannot be deleted at all. They can only be hidden, because deleting the page never deleted the data and the button was misleading.
Hide is the right answer more often than you would think
A page for a production that closed. A workshop page between terms. A press page before you have any press. In every one of those cases you will want the page back, and rebuilding it from memory is a bad use of an evening.
Hidden pages keep their content, their address and their settings. They simply leave the menu. The switch is on the pages screen next to the drag handle you use to reorder your menu.
What deleting still does
Removes the page and its text permanently. Photos and videos attached to your account are not deleted, because they live in your media library rather than on the page. If you delete a page and want it back, we cannot restore it for you, which is exactly why the flow now asks twice.
The broader habit
Websites decay by accumulation, not by deletion. The instinct to tidy is a good one. Just point it at accuracy rather than at removal: fix the out-of-date credit, replace the four-year-old headshot, correct the email that goes to an account you abandoned. Our piece on keeping an actor website fresh is the fuller version of that argument.
Building from scratch instead? Start at create an actor website.
