Setting up 301 redirects without losing rankings: the redirect plan for a relaunch

A 301 redirect plan maps every old URL to its new URL. That includes every page where only the URL slug changes.

That way your visitors, links and rankings survive your relaunch. That is the whole job.

The verdict: a correct 301 redirect doesn’t cost you rankings. Missing, lazy or untested redirects do, so map everything one-to-one and test before launch.

The short answer to how you build such a plan:

1. Map all your existing URLs.
2. Connect them one-to-one to the most relevant new page.
3. Decide deliberately what you redirect or let expire.
4. Test everything before you go live.

Below we walk through that mapping step by step.

The goal: no surprise 404s after launch.

Where this fits

This is the tactical deep dive into one step of our broader playbook for a website migration without ranking loss.

There we look at the entire migration project.

This article: we zoom fully in on the redirect mapping, because that’s the step where most relaunches come unstuck.

If you’re looking for the broader framework, read our guide on building a B2B website.

The plan breaks down into five steps, best worked through in this order, from inventory to monitoring after going live:

What exactly is a 301 redirect plan?

It’s a structured list that maps every existing URL to its successor on the new site.

A 301 is a permanent redirect.

It tells browsers and search engines that a page has definitively moved to a new address.

Why 301 and not 302

The difference with a temporary 302 matters. A lot.

Only with a 301 does Google know the move is permanent and may carry over the signals you’ve built up.

Google’s wording: the redirects documentation puts it plainly: with a permanent redirect, “the indexing pipeline uses the redirect as a signal that the redirect target should be canonical.”

With a temporary one, it doesn’t. The old URL stays canonical.

Our guide to HTTP status codes for SEO covers the other codes you’ll meet.

Why the plan matters

That carrying over is why the plan matters.

Google confirms that ranking signals such as PageRank and inbound links are passed on cleanly through a 301 redirect.

Skip a valuable page and the chain breaks:

• the visitor gets a 404
• the link equity evaporates
• the position you spent years building is gone

A relaunch should protect your positions, not reset them.

How do you set up a 301 redirect?

You preferably set up a 301 redirect on the server, because that’s the form Google understands most reliably.

Google’s documentation on redirects ranks the options by how confidently Google interprets them correctly.

The ranking: server-side redirects come first, then a meta refresh of 0 seconds.

JavaScript redirects only if nothing else works.

Per platform

In practice, the method depends on your platform:

Apache server: you add the rule to the .htaccess file, for example Redirect 301 /old-page/ https://www.example.be/new-page/.

For whole patterns (a folder that gets renamed) you use a RewriteRule. The Apache mod_alias documentation also offers RedirectMatch for regex patterns.

Watch out: without a status, Apache’s Redirect defaults to a temporary 302. So always write 301 or permanent. Never leave it out.

Nginx server: you add a return 301 rule per old location in the server configuration.

The nginx rewrite module accepts a redirect URL for codes 301, 302, 303, 307 and 308.

WordPress: a redirect plugin or the redirect feature of your SEO plugin manages the list without touching server files.

Handy, but keep the list up to date as part of your redirect plan. Our WordPress migration guide covers the rest of that move.

Webflow, Shopify and other SaaS platforms: these have their own redirect screen in the settings.

Often you can import a CSV of old and new URLs.

Which status code do you choose?

This overview sums up what Google does with the common redirects:

Here’s what that check looks like for a single old URL:

Do you lose rankings with a 301 redirect?

No: a correct 301 doesn’t cost you rankings in itself.

Google uses a permanent redirect as a signal that the new URL is the canonical version, and ranking signals such as links are passed on.

What does cost rankings

The mistakes around it:

• redirects to an irrelevant page (such as the homepage)
• chains of multiple hops
• forgotten URLs that end in a 404
• redirects that are removed too early

Our experience: migrations and redesigns are the classic cause when a company’s organic traffic suddenly drops.

Badly done redirects can cut it sharply.

Expect a transition period

In its guide to site moves, Google writes that a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or longer before the new URLs replace the old ones.

Positions may fluctuate temporarily in the meantime.

How long to keep them: Google recommends keeping redirects in place for as long as possible, generally at least a year.

How do you create a complete URL inventory?

You never start with mapping, but with taking inventory: what you don’t map, you also can’t redirect.

A reliable inventory comes from multiple sources, because no single source is complete on its own.

The five sources

Pull URLs from all of these:

• A crawl of your site: every internal URL, plus existing redirects and broken links
• Your XML sitemap: the URLs you yourself mark as important
• Google Search Console: pages that are indexed and get search clicks
• Your analytics: pages that bring in traffic and, more importantly, leads
• Your backlink data: pages with external links, whose link value you can’t squander

A crawler like Screaming Frog or a comparable tool walks through your entire site. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs:

Screaming Frog’s product page, October 2026. Free up to 500 URLs; a licence lifts the limit.

Our Screaming Frog guide shows how to export every URL with its status code. Your sitemap is the second list; see how to create an XML sitemap if it’s missing.

Then check which pages earn links. The Links report in Google Search Console lists them under Top linked pages:

The Links report in our own Search Console for customerimpact.be, October 2026. Pages with external links go to the top of the redirect list.

On our site the homepage holds 2,036 of 2,116 external links.

That’s the one URL you’d never want to break.

Build one master file

Merge those lists into a master file and deduplicate it.

For each URL, add some context right away:

• monthly traffic
• external links (yes/no, how many)
• whether it converts

Those columns set your priorities. Fill them in.

For example, a page with hundreds of visitors per month and strong backlinks deserves more attention than a forgotten news item from 2018.

Tip: this inventory is also the moment to trace existing redirect chains, so you clean them up in one go.

How do you map old URLs one-to-one to new ones?

The golden rule is simple: map every valuable old URL to the most relevant new page, one to one.

Google’s John Mueller put it sharply.

A 301 for a disappeared page makes sense if you have a one-to-one replacement; otherwise Google presumably treats the redirect as a soft 404.

Relevance is the crux

Relevance is everything. In practice:

• a product page points to the new product page
• a blog article points to the replacing article
• a service page points to the corresponding new service

The mistake you want to avoid is redirecting everything en masse to the homepage because that’s faster.

Why it fails: Google sees such catch-all redirects as soft 404s. It ignores them and doesn’t pass on the signals of those old pages.

You’re then left with a tidy-looking site whose SEO value has quietly leaked away. Our explainer on the soft 404 shows how to spot one.

Work row by row

Work in your master file with two columns side by side: the old URL and the new target URL.

Go through them row by row, starting with the pages that have the most traffic and the most leads.

For example, a mapping sheet looks like this:

The rows are made up. The columns aren’t.

Keep the structure close

Keep your new URL structure as close to the old one as possible where you can. The less that changes, the smaller the risk.

How to build that new structure logically, you’ll read in our guide on website architecture and SEO.

Avoid redirect chains

When mapping, also watch out for chains: let A point directly to C instead of via B.

Google’s site move guide advises “redirecting to the final destination directly.” Superfluous intermediate steps slow down and weaken the redirect.

What do you do with pages that have no logical new destination?

You decide about them deliberately: not every old URL has a natural successor, and that’s fine.

For each page without an obvious match, you have roughly three choices:

1. Map it to the nearest relevant page

If there’s no exact replacement but there is a strongly related topic, map it to the nearest relevant page.

That’s usually the overarching category or a related article.

2. Recreate the content

If it’s a page with traffic or links but without any relevant destination, consider recreating that content on the new site.

That beats letting it disappear.

3. Let it expire

If a page has no traffic, no links and no value, let it expire cleanly with a 404 or 410. Don’t force a contrived redirect.

That choice feels counterintuitive.

But an honest 404 for worthless content beats an irrelevant redirect that gets treated as a soft 404 anyway.

Rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t link to the target page from the old one, don’t redirect to it.

The trade-off you make here belongs to the broader website redesign process.

There you decide which content moves along.

How do you test your redirect plan before launch?

Test before going live. Never afterwards.

Discovering mistakes while your traffic is already draining away is the most expensive way to do it.

Set up a protected staging environment

First set up your redirects in a protected test or staging environment that’s shielded from search engines.

Then work through your master file. Line by line.

Check every line

Check per line whether the old URL actually returns a 301. Not accidentally a 302, a 404 or a chain of multiple hops.

A crawler can test your entire redirect list in one go and immediately flags where things go wrong.

Don’t forget the edge cases

A complete plan catches all these variants:

• URLs with and without a trailing slash
• capitals in the path
• old parameters
• variants with or without www or https

Schedule the go-live itself at a quiet moment and keep your master file to hand as a checklist.

How to protect your positions even further around launch, you’ll read in maintaining rankings after a website redesign.

How do you monitor the redirects after going live?

After launch, monitoring begins, because a redirect plan only succeeds if it keeps holding up in production.

Watch your 404s

Keep a close eye on your 404 reports in Search Console.

Every unexpected 404 on an old URL is a hole in your plan that you close right away. The Search Console indexing report lists them under “Not found (404)”.

Traffic shift: also check that the traffic to the old URLs gradually shifts to the new pages.

Watch the crawl

Crawl Stats in Search Console show how Googlebot reacts to the move. A spike in 404s or server errors on launch day points to a hole in the plan:

Crawl Stats in our own Search Console for customerimpact.be, October 2026. The breakdown by response shows how many requests hit a 301 or a 404.

Our guide to crawl stats in Search Console explains each panel.

Our experience: when traffic drops after a change, we first look for a clear break date in crawl stats and Search Console.

Then we match it to what changed on the site.

Give Google time

Track whether Google picks up your new URLs and lets the old ones drop out of the index.

That usually takes several weeks to months. A temporary fluctuation is normal.

Warning sign: a lasting decline on a specific page is different. It’s a signal.

Often a redirect is missing or points to a destination that’s too little relevant.

A well-maintained redirect plan isn’t only a launch document.

It’s also your most important diagnostic aid in the weeks that follow.

The short summary

A 301 redirect plan stands or falls on completeness and relevance.

Map all your URLs from multiple sources, and connect every valuable old URL one-to-one to the most relevant new page.

Then: decide deliberately what you let expire, test everything in a protected environment and monitor your 404s after going live.

Do that carefully, and it’s not only your content that moves along. So do the rankings and leads you built with it over the years.

Wondering whether your redirect mapping is watertight, or do you simply want to play it safe with your relaunch?

Our offer: we’re a small, experienced B2B team that builds your site while preserving what works, and that tells you honestly where the risks lie. See without obligation how we build conversion-focused websites that protect your traffic and leads.

Already live? If your new site is live and your traffic is dropping, our SEO migration and recovery helps with a redirect plan, checks before and after going live and recovery of what was lost.

Contact us.

Frequently asked questions about a 301 redirect plan

What’s the difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect?

A 301 is a permanent redirect and tells search engines the move is lasting, which makes ranking signals move along. A 302 is temporary and doesn’t pass on that signal. During a relaunch you almost always use 301s, because the old URLs aren’t coming back.

Can I redirect old URLs to my homepage?

Preferably not. Google treats mass redirects to the homepage as soft 404s, ignores them and doesn’t pass on the link value of those pages. Map each page to the most relevant new destination, and let a page without value expire cleanly with a 404 instead.

How long should I keep my 301 redirects in place?

Keep them for at least a year, and preferably permanently for pages with strong external links. As long as people still arrive via old links or bookmarks and search engines know the old URLs, the redirects keep doing their work.

Which tool do I use to test my redirects?

A website crawler like Screaming Frog lets you check your entire redirect list in one go for status code and chains. For individual URLs, inspection in your browser or in Google Search Console is enough to see whether an address returns a correct 301.

Is a 308 redirect better than a 301?

For Google they make no difference: both are permanent redirects and are processed the same way. The difference is technical (a 308 keeps the request method, such as a form post). Use whatever your server or platform offers by default.

What is the difference between a 301 redirect and a canonical tag?

A 301 actually sends visitors and Google on to another address; the old page can no longer be seen. A canonical tag lets both pages exist and only tells Google which version belongs in the search results. If a page moves permanently, you use a 301.