Every few weeks a business launches a beautiful new website and watches its Google traffic fall off a cliff. The design is rarely the cause. The old pages had addresses that search engines and other websites had learned, and the new site quietly changed them. Redirects are how you avoid that.
What a redirect is
A 301 redirect tells browsers and search engines that a page has permanently moved: anyone asking for /services/hot-water.html is sent to /hot-water-systems/. Visitors never notice. Search engines transfer most of the old page's standing to the new address instead of treating it as gone.
Why it matters even for small sites
Your old service page might have been linked from a local directory, a supplier's site, a Facebook post and Google itself. Each of those links now points at a page that does not exist. Without a redirect, visitors see an error and search engines drop the page. With one, everything carries across.
How to map old to new
- Export a list of every URL on the old site (Search Console, your analytics, or a crawler like Screaming Frog).
- Beside each, write the closest equivalent page on the new site.
- Pages with no equivalent go to the most relevant parent page, not the homepage.
- Give the list to whoever is building the site before launch, not after.
Keep the addresses when you can
The simplest migration is one where the URLs do not change at all. If you are refreshing rather than restructuring, ask for the same paths. Fewer redirects means fewer things to break.
After launch
- Test ten of the most important old URLs by hand.
- Watch Search Console for "Not found" errors for a month and fix any that appear.
- Update the links you control: Google Business Profile, social profiles, email signatures, directories.
- Keep the old domain and redirects live for years if the domain changed too.
Redirect mapping is part of every YINO refresh or rebuild — see website refresh. If a recent redesign has cost you traffic, send the old and new URLs and we will check the redirects first.
