Redirects are necessary on almost every website. In this post you’ll learn about the 301 redirects along with how to use them.
The average person moves more than 11 times in their lifetime. So why would websites be any different? Whether you’re changing your brand or just moving to a more effective domain, you need to be prepared.
The last thing you want is to lose all of that valuable traffic to your old domain and pages. Whether you’re moving your entire site or just getting rid of an old page, don’t ignore the traffic and authority that page has built over time. With 301 redirects, you can keep your record in place.
Like so many web development tools, a 301 redirect can sound complex. At its core however, it’s actually quite simple. In this post we’ll dig into the basics of redirects. We will provide some actionable tips that will help you avoid losing important traffic during a simple move.
In web development, a redirect is a line of code that moves traffic from an existing or old URL onto a new one. There are three types of redirects you should know about:
The most common and relevant of the above is the 301 redirect, which is the focus of this post. It tells site visitors and search engine crawlers that the page has moved to a new home, and redirects them there.
A URL is like the mailing address of a web page. It tells everyone who cares (visitors and search engine crawlers, mostly) how to find the content on it. When that URL changes, those visitors and crawlers become lost.
When they try to reach it, they’ll find a 404 ‘page not found’ error—the web development equivalent of a ‘returned to sender’ piece of post.
This is not great. Search engine crawlers especially, assume that the content doesn’t exist any more. The resulting broken links can have negative side effects for your SEO efforts, not to mention the diminished user experience.
Enter the 301 redirect. It preserves the integrity of both the link and the content on the page, meaning you don’t lose any of the authority and credibility you’ve built over time.
Because of those benefits mentioned above, almost every website has at least a few 301 redirects in place. Below are just the most common examples:
In most cases, your web agency will build your redirects. With any type of migration, it should be a key question on your mind to ensure they do it right.
That said, you can build your own redirects as well depending on the tools you use. On WordPress, for instance, you can use one of two plugins to build them without any prior coding knowledge:
Besides the technical part, you’ll also want to take care of some maintenance items to ensure you always know when a redirect is needed. A site migration is an obvious use case. But how do you know what’s actually in place, and where you need to still build those redirects?
The goal should be to avoid those dreaded 404 errors, but also make sure you don’t end up with any redirect loops or chains. These will slow things down and create a poor user experience. Try to keep redirects to a maximum of 3 or 4 in a chain.
With the right maintenance and the ability to create and edit redirects as needed, you can achieve the above, helping to keep your website well optimised for search.
All of the above make perfect sense in single page use cases. But what if you migrate your entire website? In that case, use this checklist to get your redirects right:
And that’s it! It’s comprehensive, but necessary. Whether you need your redirects for a single page or an entire website migration, they become an essential tool in keeping everything flowing naturally and getting your visitors where they need to go.
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