You’re preparing a website migration and suddenly you have a spreadsheet with hundreds, maybe thousands, of old URLs.
Some are important pages. Some haven’t had a visitor in years. Others belong to campaigns nobody remembers creating.
Do all of them really need a redirect?
No.
A good website migration isn’t about keeping every URL your website has ever produced alive. It’s about making sure the URLs that still matter have somewhere useful to go.
Start with what happened to the page
Every old URL doesn’t need the same treatment.
Imagine your old website has:
example.com/about-us
and the new website has:
example.com/company
That page clearly moved. Redirect it.
Now imagine you have:
example.com/summer-sale-2021
The campaign ended years ago, the offer no longer exists, and there’s nothing comparable on the new website.
That URL doesn’t necessarily need a redirect at all.
A useful way to think about old URLs is:
Page moved → redirect it
Page was replaced → redirect it to the closest relevant replacement
Page was merged → redirect it to the page containing that content now
Content is permanently gone → a 404 or 410 may be appropriate
The goal is not to eliminate every 404. It’s to avoid unnecessary dead ends.
Prioritize the URLs that already have value
If you’re dealing with a large website, reviewing every URL individually may not be worth the time.
Start with the ones that have something to lose.
Look for:
URLs receiving organic or referral traffic.
Pages with backlinks from other websites.
Pages ranking for useful search queries.
URLs linked from important external sources.
Pages people regularly visit or bookmark.
URLs that clearly have an equivalent on the new website.
These deserve attention because people or search engines are already using them.
A forgotten URL created by an old CMS filter with no traffic, links, or replacement is a very different case from a service page that ranks on Google and has twenty websites linking to it.
Treating both as equally important only makes the migration harder than it needs to be.
Don’t send everything to the homepage
When there are hundreds of old URLs to deal with, one shortcut can look particularly tempting:
Redirect all of them to the new homepage.
Technically, the visitor reaches a working page. Problem solved, right?
Not really.
Someone clicking:
oldsite.com/pricing
probably wants pricing.
Someone following:
oldsite.com/blog/website-migration
probably wants that article.
Sending both of them to newsite.com removes the context that made those links useful in the first place.
Search engines can also treat redirects to irrelevant destinations as soft 404s rather than meaningful page moves.
If there’s a relevant destination, use it. If there isn’t, don’t invent one just to make the old URL return something other than a 404.
Build a redirect map before launch
The easiest time to figure this out is while the old website is still available.
Export or collect its URLs, identify the important ones, and match them to the new site.
Your redirect map might look like:
/about-us → /company
/our-services/web-design → /services/websites
/case-studies → /work
/contact-us → /contact
Then mark URLs that have no meaningful replacement rather than forcing them into the map.
A practical migration process looks like this:
Collect the URLs from the old website.
Use traffic, rankings, backlinks, and business importance to identify priority pages.
Match those pages to their closest equivalents on the new website.
Create permanent redirects for URLs that have moved.
Leave genuinely removed content without a redirect when there’s no relevant destination.
Update internal links so the new website points directly to its new URLs.
Test your redirect map before launch.
Check for unexpected 404s after the migration.
You can always add a redirect later if you discover an old URL that people are still using.
Watch out for redirect chains
A migration is also a good opportunity to clean up redirects that already exist.
Maybe years ago:
/old-services → /services
And during the new migration:
/services → /what-we-do
If you leave everything as it is, the result becomes:
/old-services → /services → /what-we-do
It will probably still get the visitor there, but the middle step is unnecessary.
Instead, update the old rule:
/old-services → /what-we-do
and keep:
/services → /what-we-do
The same principle applies across the migration. Whenever possible, old URLs should point directly to their final destinations rather than travelling through a chain of previous versions.
What if you’re also changing domains?
If the migration moves the website to a new domain, the same rules apply, but keeping control of the old domain becomes essential.
For example:
oldsite.com/services → newsite.com/services
The old website doesn’t need to remain online forever. The old domain does need to stay under your control for its redirects to continue working.
Google recommends keeping site-move redirects in place for at least a year. If the old domain still has useful backlinks or receives traffic after that, keeping those redirects running for longer can make sense.
This is where separating redirects from the old website can be useful. Redirect Supply lets the old domain keep handling its redirects without requiring you to keep the old site or hosting online.
Redirect what deserves a destination
A website migration doesn’t need to preserve every URL equally.
Some old pages have moved. Some have been replaced. Some still carry traffic and backlinks. Those URLs deserve careful redirects.
Others are simply finished.
Instead of asking, “How do we redirect every old URL?”, ask a better question:
“Where should someone visiting this URL reasonably go now?”
If there’s a good answer, create the redirect.
If there isn’t, you probably don’t need one.
