Relaunch – What Can Go Wrong with Redirects?

The big day has arrived: the new website is ready, and it’s time for the relaunch – that is, replacing the old website with the newly created one and going live. But suddenly, the site no longer ranks as usual, and website visitors only find a 404 error under familiar URLs? Then something seems to have gone wrong with your redirects. How to avoid redirect errors during your relaunch and prevent them is explained in the following blog post.

Why Are Redirects Important?

You have a successful website and want to give it a new look, use a different CMS, or improve user-friendliness – very good reasons to relaunch your homepage. But you certainly don’t want to lose the organic traffic that flows in through search engines due to a relaunch. This happens, however, when your users encounter error messages instead of thematically relevant content when entering familiar URLs. Therefore, correct redirects should be one of your top priorities. We explain when it makes sense to set up a redirect.

Which URL Needs a Redirect?

Before your new website goes live, ask yourself the following questions:

• Which of the old URLs will remain?
• Which URLs will change during the relaunch?
• Are there any thematically appropriate URLs that can be considered as redirect targets?

Every URL on your old website that was always live, generated a lot of traffic, or was used for advertising campaigns has the potential for redirection. Many users save interesting pages and access them via bookmarks in their browsers – but if they then see a 404 message instead of the usual content, they quickly bounce off, and a return visit to the homepage is unlikely. Therefore, take an inventory of your entire website before the relaunch. Crawl the site either through the CMS or use a practical SEO tool – like Screaming Frog, for example.

To get a better overview, create a table listing all the old URLs and enter the new URL in a column next to the old URL. If there are pages that will completely disappear due to the relaunch, find a new URL with thematically relevant content and enter it in the new URLs column. If none of the new pages fit thematically, simply redirect the affected URL to the homepage to ensure that the user does not land on an empty page. With this clear redirect plan, you can now set up your redirects. Don’t know how? We reveal it in the next paragraph.

The 301 Redirect

The 301 redirect – also called “moved permanently” – ensures that the old link of your website permanently leads to the new URL. To set up a 301 redirect, you need the .htaccess file of your website. To guarantee an error-free redirect process, you should have your developer enter the redirects into the .htaccess file. What function does a redirect have? We explain this in the following section.

How Does a 301 Redirect Work?

When a user or a Google bot wants to access a specific target page, the web server checks if this page is accessible. Since the requested page is no longer available, it cannot find it initially – but if a 301 redirect is set up, the request is automatically redirected to the entered target page.

As you can see, setting up redirects is extremely important during a relaunch. As experts, we are happy to assist you and take over this tedious work for you!