We are doing a complete overhaul of our website a fresh install of wordpress and new theme. In the process we will be removing everything from our root web directory and starting fresh. Over the past 6 years since this website has been live it has accumulated quite the minefield of old images, documents, etc. I am the new web developer here currently only about six months under my belt and I would like to make sure everything is clean and organized.
A problem I foresee though is that before my time we were handing out HTML snippets of our products so that dealers can just copy and past this onto their page thus having images, descriptions, links, etc. Now no images were included with these snippets so the images on their site are being pulled from our server taking up our bandwidth. Most of the images and descriptions are old and outdated and have changed over time so several dealers have different variations of images, descriptions and links.
If I want to clean this site up deleting these images and making new links will break all the product pages on their sites. What are some recommendations for making this a smooth going process. Obviously an email blast, but beyond that is it worth the work sifting through hundreds of sites to find the different links and images and making sure they don't break? Has anyone encountered something like this before?