Knowledge
Redirects during a website relaunch: what businesses should know about 301s
"301 redirect" sounds like a developer topic. For you as a business owner, though, it's mainly one thing: the single most important lever for not losing anything your website has already earned during a relaunch.
In short
A 301 redirect tells Google and visitors: "This page has permanently moved, here's the new address." According to Google Search Central, that itself causes no loss of visibility — the risk arises when this redirect is missing.
What a redirect does, in plain terms
Imagine your shop moves to a new street. A redirect is like a sign at the old address: "We've moved — this way." Without that sign, customers (and Google) hit a locked door and don't know where to go next.
Technically, that's exactly what happens: when someone opens the old URL of your website, they're automatically redirected to the new URL without noticing. Visitors typically don't even realise a redirect happened in the background — they simply land directly on the correct, current page.
Why this matters so much during a relaunch
Google has already crawled and, to some extent, ranked your existing website. If URLs change during a relaunch without redirects in place, Google's next visit finds an empty spot where a page used to be. From Google's perspective, that's not "the same page at a new address" — it's simply: gone.
For real visitors opening an old link from an email, a bookmark, or another article, the path without a redirect ends in an error page instead of your offer. Especially with older but still-effective marketing materials — printed material listing a specific web address, for instance — that can directly mean lost enquiries.
What Google Search Central officially says
According to Google Search Central's official documentation on site moves, permanent redirects (301 or 308) themselves don't cause a loss of link value. The recommendation is also to keep redirect chains short — pointing directly to the final new page rather than through several intermediate steps — and to keep redirects active for at least a year after a move.
What this means for you as a business owner — without developer jargon
You don't need to know yourself how a 301 redirect is technically set up. But for any relaunch project, you should get a clear answer to this question: "What happens to our existing pages and links?" If that's answered with "we'll take care of it" without getting specific, it's worth pushing further.
A good question to ask any agency or freelancer: "Can you show me which of our current page addresses will redirect to which new address?" A serious answer to that is concrete — not just a general promise.
Common questions
What you'd want to know beforehand
Do I need a separate redirect for every old page?
Ideally yes — every old URL should redirect specifically to the most relevant new URL, not as a blanket redirect to the homepage.
Is a redirect something I can set up myself?
Technically it's usually a server-side configuration. In practice, the agency or developer implementing the relaunch handles it — what matters is that it's planned for at all.
What if I want to remove a page entirely, with no replacement?
Then that URL should be removed deliberately and in a controlled way rather than simply vanishing — when in doubt, a redirect to the closest matching existing page is worthwhile.
Planning a relaunch?
We approach your relaunch in a structured way — including the question of what happens to your existing pages.