redirect map
A redirect map is the list that automatically sends every old web address to its new equivalent so links, bookmarks and search rankings keep working after a site changes.
When a website moves to a new platform, or its pages get restructured, the exact web addresses often change along with it. A page that used to live at yourbusiness.com/services might end up at yourbusiness.com/what-we-do on the new site. Anyone who had the old address bookmarked, or any search result still pointing at it, would hit a dead page the moment the switch happens, unless something catches that old address and sends the visitor to the right new one automatically.
That something is a redirect map: a list pairing every old address with its new equivalent, using what is technically called a 301 redirect, a permanent instruction telling browsers and search engines that the page has moved for good. It is built before a site launches, not fixed afterward once broken links start showing up.
The map has to be built from a full inventory of what actually pointed at the old site, not a guess, which means checking inbound links and any pages already ranking before deciding what needs to be caught.
Why it matters to you
Every broken link is a lost visitor, and at scale it is worse than that. Search engines that find a page returning an error where a working page used to be will eventually stop showing that address in results at all, taking years of accumulated ranking with it. A site that moves platforms without a redirect map can lose real search visibility within weeks, not because the new site is worse, but because the old addresses simply stopped answering.
It also matters for anyone who linked to you from another site. That link took effort to earn, and a redirect map is what keeps it useful instead of turning it into a dead end the moment your own site changes underneath it.
How I set it up
Before moving a site, I pull every address that has ever been linked to or indexed, using the site’s existing analytics, search console data and a crawl of the current pages, and I check each one for where it should now point. Addresses already broken on the old site get fixed in the same pass rather than carried forward as-is.
The redirects themselves get written as part of the new site’s DNS and hosting setup on Cloudflare, so they apply the moment the new site goes live, with no gap where an old address returns an error before the fix catches up.
What it looks like in practice
To a visitor, nothing looks unusual at all. They click an old link or open an old bookmark, and the new page loads, sometimes with a different address showing in the browser bar, sometimes not, depending on how the redirect is written. To a search engine, the message is equally simple: this content has a new home, treat it exactly the way you treated the old one.
Questions I get about this
- What actually breaks if I skip the redirect map?
- Every old link pointing at your site, from other websites, from search results, from a bookmark someone saved years ago, starts returning an error page instead of your content. Visitors bounce, and search engines eventually stop trusting the address enough to rank it.
- Is a redirect the same as just changing my site's design?
- No. You can redesign a site completely and keep every address the same, which needs no redirect map at all. A redirect map only matters when the actual web addresses change, such as moving to a new platform that structures URLs differently.
Where this fits in our work
Want this set up properly for your business?
This is the kind of thing I build every week. Grab a time and we will talk through what fits.