Discontinued items: Disabling or deleting? What's the best practice?

[bnsn _store]

Hello, 

I was wondering is there any performance issue if a large set of discontinued items are being disabled? 

The discontinued items can be also deleted permanently. 

So was wondering what's the best practice. 

Thanks 

[gelanivishal]

Hello @bnsn _store ,

I'm no SEO expert, but most of the clients that I worked with (that had SEO experts as consultants) wanted the following scenario.
They called these products 'discontinued'.

• A discontinued product page should only be accessible via manual URL. So no links in the website to the product. For this, I set the product visibility to 'Catalog' and removed the product from any category. This way Google can still access the product pages.
• A discontinued product must be out of stock. So I allowed out of stock products to be visible.
• I added an other attribute yes/no called 'discontinued' in order to show a message like 'This product is discontinued....bla bla'. and to diferentiate between products that are simply not in stock and those that are discontinued.
• Some of the clients wanted the price to be removed also from the discontinued product page

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[Tarandeep Singh]

@bnsn _storeBefore deciding Disabling them or Deleting them would require you to get answer of many question. Disabling/Deleting/Out of stock etc all has their pros and cons. If you have more information around it will help you decide.

Some of the reason is already provided to you by @gelanivishal . Other things you need to look into is like do you have options available for discontinued products? If you do you may need to put a message or forwarding for the new products.

How big is your catalog. If really huge deleting them would make sense as it will keep your Magento light weigh and avoid Magento to overload. I am not sure about the infrastructure. If servers are decent and having those addition SKU will not affect the SKU then you can keep them.

Various other factors can help you decide. However, keeping disabled product will not make sense. Either utilize them for some purpose or delete them to keep your Magento site slick and clean.

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