Two months after a Santa Fe bakery relaunched its website, its owner opened Google Analytics and lost a night’s sleep. Organic traffic was down 43%. The old blog posts that used to bring in customers searching for “vegan wedding cake Santa Fe” had disappeared from Google. The redesign was beautiful. The redirects were missing.
A 301 redirect is a small technical instruction that tells browsers and search engines: “This page permanently moved. Send anyone asking for the old URL to this new one instead.” Skipping them during a redesign is the single most common way a website loses the SEO equity it took years to earn.
What a 301 redirect actually is
A 301 is a status code your web server sends when someone asks for a page that has permanently moved. Instead of a 404 “not found” error, the visitor’s browser (or Google’s crawler) is quietly forwarded to the new URL. Backlinks, search rankings, and bookmarks that point to the old URL keep working.
The 302 status code exists for temporary moves. For a redesign, you almost always want 301, because “we permanently changed the URL structure” is the whole point.
The redirect map is a spreadsheet, not a plugin
Before you write a single redirect rule, you need a redirect map — a spreadsheet that lists every URL on your current site and the exact URL it should send visitors to on the new one.
The columns are simple:
- Source URL — the old address, exactly as it appears today.
- Destination URL — where that page should go on the redesigned site.
- Notes — why. “Old services page → new bundled service hub” is enough.
Get the list of source URLs from your existing sitemap (usually at /sitemap.xml) and, if you can, a full crawl with a tool like Screaming Frog. Sitemaps miss pages; crawls catch them.
Then walk the list in batches of 50 to 100. Every old URL needs a destination.
Rules for matching old URLs to new ones
A few discipline points separate a redirect map that works from one that quietly leaks traffic.
Match relevance, not just structure. An old blog post about “how to pick a fly rod” should redirect to the closest surviving article, not to /blog/. A discontinued product should go to the category page for its replacement, not the homepage.
Don’t dump everything on the homepage. Google treats a mass-homepage redirect as a soft 404 — it stops crediting the old page’s ranking signals to anything. If nothing on the new site is a genuine match for an old page, redirect to the most relevant category or hub page instead. Homepage is a last resort.
Redirect straight to the final URL. Chains — where URL A goes to B goes to C — waste crawl budget and dilute signals. If the old URL used to redirect somewhere already, update the map so the final rule points to the new destination in one hop.
Watch for trailing slashes, capital letters, and query strings. The URLs /services/branding and /services/branding/ are different to a search engine. Include both variants in your map when they existed.
Do I have to keep old redirects forever?
Keep 301 redirects live for at least 12 months, and for any high-value page — a top-ranking post, a page with real backlinks — keep them indefinitely. The redirect is what tells Google to consolidate the old URL’s authority onto the new one. Remove it too early and any lingering links become 404s again.
Storage is free. There is almost never a good reason to delete a working 301.
How to actually set them up in WordPress
For most small business sites, the Redirection plugin is the right tool. It’s free, actively maintained, and lets you paste your map straight into the dashboard without touching a server file. It also detects when you change a post’s permalink and creates a 301 automatically, which prevents a whole category of “I renamed a slug and broke my URL” mistakes.
For a large catalog site — the ongoing engagement with W Department, a Santa Fe boutique with a heavily customized WooCommerce store and hundreds of designer and category pages, is one example — server-level redirects in .htaccess (Apache) or the server config (Nginx) run faster than a plugin. But they are also unforgiving: a stray character can take a site down. That’s a case for someone comfortable in server files, not a first-time redesign.
Either way, the rule is the same: import your redirect map before the new site goes live, then test.
Test before launch, then again after
Before the redesign is live, use a staging environment. Run the old URLs through a redirect checker — free tools like httpstatus.io work — and confirm each one returns a 301, not a 302 or a 404, and lands on a page that returns a 200 status. No chains, no dead ends.
After launch, monitor Google Search Console’s Coverage report weekly for the first month. A spike in 404s means you missed URLs; add them to the map and update the rules. This is normal. It’s also cheap to fix if you catch it in the first 60 days.
The cost of skipping this step
Without a redirect map, traffic losses of 20–60% after a redesign are not unusual — and the pages that fall hardest are usually the ones with the most inbound links, which is exactly the equity a business paid to build. Recovering that traffic can take six to twelve months of new content and link work, when an afternoon of spreadsheet work at launch would have prevented it.
A redesign is a chance to make a better website, not a reason to give up the traffic and links the old one earned. The technical work of a redirect map takes an afternoon on a small site and a few days on a large one.
If you’re weighing a redesign and want the SEO you already have to survive it, Patrick Iverson builds custom WordPress websites in Santa Fe and across New Mexico, and treats the redirect map as part of the launch, not a nice-to-have afterthought.