301 redirects: keep your Google rankings when you rebuild

The quickest way to lose your Google rankings is to launch a beautiful new website with different page addresses and no redirects.

Google has spent years learning that yoursite.com.au/services/hot-water-repairs is a good answer for “hot water repairs Ballina”. The new site moves that page to /hot-water/. To Google, the old page has vanished and the new one is a stranger. Rankings, and the calls that came with them, can drop within weeks.

A 301 redirect tells browsers and search engines that a page has moved permanently and where it went. Done properly, most of the old page’s standing carries over. These are the five steps we follow on every rebuild.

Step 1: list every old URL worth keeping

Before the old site is switched off, gather its URLs from several sources. Each catches things the others miss.

1. Google Search Console, Performance report. Set the date range to the longest available, open the Pages tab, and export. This shows the pages that earn search clicks.
2. Google Analytics. The Pages and screens report shows which pages get visits from any source, including social and email. Our guide to Google Analytics 4 for people who don’t want to learn Google Analytics shows where to find it.
3. Search Console, Links report. Look at “Top linked pages”. Pages that other websites link to carry value even if their traffic is small.
4. The old XML sitemap. Usually at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml. It lists pages you might not think of, like old blog posts.
5. A crawl. A tool such as Screaming Frog (free for smaller sites) will find every page, PDF and image the old site links to.

Put everything into one spreadsheet and remove duplicates. Don’t forget PDFs. A price list or brochure that people have bookmarked for years is easy to miss.

Step 2: decide which pages matter

Not every URL needs equal attention, but most deserve a redirect. Sort the list into three groups:

• Must redirect: anything with search clicks, visits, or external links. These pages are your rankings.
• Should redirect: everything else that had real content. It costs almost nothing to redirect them.
• Let go: test pages, tag archives, attachment pages and spam. These can return a 404 or 410.

Step 3: map old to new

For every old URL, choose the single closest match on the new site. Closest means same topic, not just “somewhere useful”.

A mapping for a typical plumbing site looks like this:

Two rules from Google’s own guidance on site moves are worth following to the letter:

• Don’t redirect everything to the homepage. Google treats mass redirects to an unrelated page much like the page being deleted. If there’s no close match, consider whether the new site is missing content it should have.
• Avoid chains. If /old/ already redirects to /older-new/, and that now moves to /newest/, point /old/ straight at /newest/. One hop, not three.

Step 4: set the redirects up

You have a few options, depending on your setup.

In WordPress

If the site runs Yoast SEO Premium, its redirect manager does the job. Per Yoast’s instructions:

1. Go to Yoast SEO > Redirects.
2. Choose 301 Moved Permanently as the redirect type.
3. Enter the old path as the Old URL.
4. Enter the full new address as the New URL.
5. Click Add redirect.

Redirects are a Premium feature in Yoast, though. On the free version, the common free route is the Redirection plugin, which sits under Tools > Redirection once installed. You add each old path as the source, the new page as the target, and check it’s set to a 301.

For more than a dozen redirects, don’t type them one at a time. Both Yoast Premium and Redirection can import redirects from a CSV file, so your mapping spreadsheet becomes the import.

On the server

On Apache or LiteSpeed hosting, redirects can go in the .htaccess file. They run before WordPress loads, which is slightly faster, but a typo can take the whole site down. We only use this for domain-level rules, such as forcing https or redirecting an old domain to a new one.

On Shopify

Shopify has a built-in URL redirects tool in the admin (search the admin for “URL redirects”), and it supports CSV imports too. It also offers to create a redirect when you change a product’s URL handle. Make sure that box is ticked.

Step 5: check them after launch

Launch day isn’t the end of it. This is where most redirect work falls over.

On the day. Paste your top 20 old URLs into a browser one by one. Each should land on the correct new page, with the address bar showing the new URL. Then run the whole old URL list through a redirect checker or crawler set to list mode, and look for anything returning 404, 302 or a chain.

In the first fortnight. Watch the 404 log. The Redirection plugin records every missed URL, and Search Console’s Pages report catches them too, more slowly. Anything that appears more than once probably deserves a redirect.

Over the next two months. In Search Console, check the Pages report under Indexing for “Not found (404)” and “Page with redirect”. Some redirect entries are normal while Google catches up. Compare search clicks to the same period on the old site. A short dip is common while Google recrawls. A steady slide after a month means something was missed.

For the long term. Google recommends keeping redirects in place for at least a year. We leave them permanently. They cost nothing and old links keep turning up for years.

If you’ve already launched without redirects

Don’t panic, but move quickly. Pull the old URLs from Search Console (it keeps them for 16 months), check the Wayback Machine for the old site structure, and add redirects for the pages that had traffic. The sooner you do it, the more ranking signal you recover.

Redirects are one line in our website launch checklist, but they’re the line that protects the most value. A full redirect map is part of the rebuilds we do through our web design service. If your rankings dropped after someone else’s rebuild, talk to us about tracing what went missing, which is often the first job in an SEO recovery.