301 Redirects: How to Move a URL and Keep Your Visitors and Rankings

Every change on a website — a redesign, a new category structure, moving from .com to your national domain, merging two articles into one — leaves old URLs behind. And those old addresses are still targeted by links from other sites, Google results, saved bookmarks. Without redirects, all of them end up on a 404 page: the visitor gives up, and Google slowly erases the rankings you spent years building. The solution is as old as the web: the 301 redirect.

301 vs 302: what''s the difference

• 301 (permanent redirect) — tells Google: "this page has moved for good, transfer all its authority to the new address." The old URL gradually drops out of the index, and the new one inherits its rankings and links. This is what you want in 95% of cases.
• 302 (temporary redirect) — "the page is temporarily elsewhere, keep the old one indexed." Makes sense for short-term promotions or A/B tests, but when a 302 sits where a 301 belongs, authority doesn''t transfer properly — one of the most common silent SEO mistakes.

Good news: authority transfer through a 301 is practically lossless — Google confirmed back in 2016 that 301s no longer "leak" PageRank the way they once did.

When 301 redirects are mandatory

• A redesign or new URL structure (e.g. /products/shoes becomes /footwear)
• Moving to a new domain, or switching between www and non-www
• Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS
• Deleting a page that has traffic or backlinks — redirect it to the closest living equivalent
• Merging similar articles into one stronger piece

How to set them up in practice

On Apache servers, the classic is the .htaccess file: Redirect 301 /old-page /new-page for individual URLs, or RewriteRule patterns for bulk redirects. On WordPress, it''s easier to use a plugin like Redirection — free, it logs 404 errors and lets you manage redirects without touching code. For bigger migrations, build a mapping table: every old URL → its exact new counterpart.

The most common mistakes

• Everything to the homepage. Redirecting 200 old URLs to the homepage is treated by Google as a soft 404 — the authority is lost. Always redirect to the closest equivalent.
• Redirect chains. A → B → C → D slows the site down and dilutes the signal. Update old rules to point directly at the final destination.
• Loops (A → B → A) — the page becomes unreachable for everyone.
• Forgotten internal links. Redirects catch external visits, but update your own menus and in-text links to point directly at the new URLs.
• Deleting redirects after a few months. Keep them for at least a year, ideally forever — external links don''t expire.

Checking that everything works

After setup, test a handful of old URLs with a tool like httpstatus.io (you want exactly one hop: 301 → 200) and watch the Search Console 404 report over the following weeks. Redirects execute on the server, so hosting speed affects every one of those hops — on our NVMe plans a redirect costs a couple of milliseconds. And if you''re moving an entire site, read our guide to migrating a site without downtime first.