A redesign goes live, everyone admires it, and six weeks later the traffic chart tells a different story. Missing redirects are the usual culprit, and they are invisible from the homepage. Nobody complains, because the people hitting dead links simply leave and never tell you.
Why redirects decide whether a redesign holds
Every old address is an asset. Search engines rank it, other sites link to it, and customers bookmarked it. Change the structure without a map and you throw that away. A permanent redirect passes the value across, which is why Google’s guidance on 301 redirects treats them as the standard tool for any move. Therefore the redirect map is not a technical detail. It is the part that protects everything you earned before the redesign.
Build the map before launch
- Export every existing URL. Take them from your sitemap, your analytics and Search Console together.
- Point each one at its closest new page. Not the homepage — that reads as a dead end to everyone.
- Keep the chains short. One hop is fine, three is slow and loses value on the way.
- Retire nothing silently. If a page genuinely goes, send it somewhere useful and say so on that page.
The addresses people forget
Blog posts from years ago, PDF price lists, image files used in old newsletters, and any URL printed on physical material. Also check anything a partner or supplier links to, because their pages rarely get updated when yours change. In addition, remember the language variants: a Greek page moving must take its `/el/` twin with it. Our post on redesign versus rebuild covers when the change is worth making at all, and the maintenance habit keeps the map current afterwards.
Checking it actually worked
On launch day, open ten of your best-performing old URLs and follow each one. Then watch Search Console for a fortnight, because crawl errors surface there before they surface in your revenue. Finally, keep the redirects, and keep a copy of the map in your documentation. Removing them a year later “to tidy up” undoes the whole exercise, since old links never expire and neither does the value they carry.
