Define and implement redirects

Redirects are the infrastructure of a site migration or URL change. Get them right before launch, and the site picks up where the old one left off. Get them wrong, and you're rebuilding trust with Google from scratch.

The starting point is a redirect map: a spreadsheet with every old URL in one column and its new destination in another. For a new site on a fresh domain, the map may be short — just a handful of old URLs that had backlinks or organic traffic. For a migration from an established site, the map can have hundreds of rows.

How to build the redirect map: use Screaming Frog to crawl your current live site and export the full list of indexed URLs. Then, for each URL, decide: does this page exist on the new site? If yes, map it. If not, where should traffic go? Ideally to the closest equivalent page, not the homepage. A generic redirect to the homepage erases the topical relevance built up by the old page's link profile.

In Webflow, redirects are added under Site Settings → Hosting → 301 Redirects. Old path on the left, new path on the right. Add all your redirects before publishing the new site. There's no grace period — the moment the new site is live, old URLs need to resolve correctly.

Two scenarios to handle separately: if you're replacing an existing site at the same domain, your redirects need to be in place the moment the new site goes live. If you're launching a brand-new domain, redirects are less critical at launch but become important later when you change URLs.

After going live, validate your most important redirects manually. Paste old URLs into your browser and confirm they land on the correct destination. A browser extension like Redirect Path shows the exact HTTP status code for any URL, so you can verify you're getting a 301 and not a 302 or a chain.

Then, a week or two after launch, check Google Search Console's Coverage report for "Redirect error" entries. These indicate redirects that are broken or looping. Fix them before they accumulate and start affecting how Google indexes your pages.