Work with the Recycle bin

What you’ll find in this guide:

You’ll learn how to safely restore deleted pages, content items, and emails. You’ll also see how to check where your restored items appear and how to permanently delete content you no longer need. Plus, you’ll get a look at what happens in the background so you can avoid surprises on your live site.

When you delete a page, content item, email, or headless item in Xperience by Kentico, it is not permanently removed right away. Instead, Xperience moves it to the recycle bin, where you can restore it if needed.

This gives you a safety net when you:

Remove campaign content too early.
Clean up reusable assets and later realize they are still needed.
Test content and want to roll back the changes you made during testing.
Delete the wrong content by accident.

Xperience’s recycle bin helps you work with content confidently, knowing that deleted items aren’t gone for good.

Recycle bin prerequisites and permissions

If you don’t see the Recycle bin application, contact your administrator to check your permissions.

You need the View permission to access the recycle bin.
Users with the View permission can restore and permanently delete items they deleted.
Users can only see items they deleted themselves.
Administrators can work with items deleted by any user.

How the recycle bin works

Open the Recycle bin application from the Content management app in Xperience. Here, you’ll see items that you deleted, which may include pages, content items, emails,and headless items.

Recycle bin basics to understand

Before restoring content that you previously deleted, keep these rules in mind:

Restored items return in the Draft state.
References to restored pages and content items are also restored.
References to headless items are not restored.
Restored emails do not keep their statistics or contact activities.
Restored emails need to be reassigned to forms or wherever else they may be selected, because these selections are also not automatically restored.

Restoring items to the Draft status is especially helpful. It allows you to review the content and check where it is used before publishing anything to the live site.

Recycle bin retention period

Items in the recycle bin are deleted permanently after a set retention period.
By default, deleted items are kept for 30 days, unless your administrator changes this.

Retention policy and storage space

This information is primarily relevant for administrators.

Administrators can adjust the retention period in Settings → Content → Recycle bin.
The retention policy should balance how long you want to keep things recoverable with how much storage space you have.
Assets (such as images or videos) remain on the file system until the item is permanently deleted.

Restoring essentials

When you restore a page or content item, any existing references to it are also restored. This means that once you publish the restored item, it may automatically reappear in:

Hero items.
Linked content.
Promotional banners.
Emails.

Always check item usage before publishing. Restore only the content you want visitors to see.