Do my old links still work after a redesign?
Worth a look
Frequently not — and this is the single most costly avoidable mistake in a website redesign. If page addresses change and nothing maps the old ones to the new ones, every link anyone ever made to those pages now leads nowhere, and the search credit those pages had built up goes with them.
What gets lost
Years of accumulated credit, in the specific sense that matters: a page that ranked well did so partly because other sites linked to it. Change its address without a redirect and those links point at an error page. Search engines treat the old page as gone and the new one as brand new.
Also lost: anything anyone bookmarked, every link in old emails and printed material, and every reference from a directory, a supplier's site or a local news article. Those are usually the links you can't rebuild.
The frustrating part is that this is cheap to prevent and expensive to fix afterwards, and the damage shows up gradually enough that it often gets blamed on something else.
What good redirects look like
Permanent (301), not temporary (302). A temporary redirect tells search engines to keep the old address on file and not transfer anything to the new one — which is precisely wrong when the move is permanent.
One hop. Chains — old address to a second old address to the current one — lose a little at each step and slow the page. A redirect that has been layered over three site rebuilds is worth flattening.
To the equivalent page, not the home page. Redirecting everything to the home page is technically a redirect and practically a dead end: the visitor who wanted your pricing page now has to find it, and search engines treat a mass redirect to the home page much like a missing page.
When there's no equivalent page
Sometimes the old page genuinely has no successor. That's fine — send it to the most closely related page, or let it return a proper 404 with a helpful page around it.
An honest 404 is better than a misleading redirect. What's not acceptable is a soft 404: a page that says “not found” to a human while telling search engines everything is fine.
How to check this yourself
- Search Google for site:yourbusiness.co.uk and click a handful of results — especially older-looking pages. Any that error are pages Google still lists and visitors can still reach.
- Dig out an old email, brochure or directory listing with a link to your site and try it.
- Set up Google Search Console (free) and look at Pages → “Not found (404)”. It lists exactly which addresses are being requested and failing.
- If you're about to redesign, export a list of your current page addresses first. That list is what the redirect map gets built from, and nobody can reconstruct it afterwards.
What to ask your web person
Copy this. It's phrased so you don't have to know the jargon to ask for the right thing.
Could you check whether our old page addresses from before the redesign still resolve? I'd like permanent 301 redirects from each old URL to its closest equivalent — not everything to the home page — and any redirect chains flattened to a single hop.
Want to know if this applies to your site?
Gus checks this and everything else in the free check-up, then explains what he found in plain English. It's free, there's no account, and it takes about a minute.