Why redirect mapping makes or breaks a migration
When URLs change during a redesign, a platform move or a restructure, every old address that has earned rankings, backlinks or bookmarks needs to send visitors and search engines to its closest new equivalent. Miss them and those URLs return 404 errors, the equity they built is lost, and organic traffic can drop sharply within weeks of launch.
Writing hundreds of rules by hand is slow and invites typos. A single misplaced character in .htaccess can even take the whole site offline. Generating the rules from a clean spreadsheet removes that risk.
How to build a good redirect map
- Crawl the old site and export every indexable URL. Add URLs from Search Console, analytics landing pages and your backlink tool, because a crawl alone misses orphaned pages that still get traffic.
- Match each URL to the most relevant new page, not simply the homepage. Blanket redirects to the homepage are often treated as soft 404s.
- Avoid chains. Point old URLs straight at the final destination rather than through an earlier redirect.
- Generate and deploy the rules, then crawl the old URL list after launch to confirm every one returns a single 301 to a live 200 page.
Apache, Nginx or WordPress?
Most shared hosting and many Plesk servers run Apache, where rules go in the site’s .htaccess file. Nginx rules belong in the server block configuration and need a reload. On WordPress, the Redirection plugin keeps redirects manageable from the dashboard and logs 404s so you can catch anything you missed.
Planning a migration? Redirects are only one piece. We run full migration audits covering crawl benchmarking, redirect validation, canonical and hreflang checks, and post-launch monitoring.