How to redirect old URLs correctly

Pick the right status code

301 — moved permanently. The default for anything that has moved for good. Signals consolidate on the destination and browsers cache it, which is the behaviour you want almost always.

308 — permanent redirect. Like 301 but preserves the request method. Matters for form submissions; rarely needed for ordinary page moves.

302 — found, temporary. Only for genuinely temporary situations — maintenance, a seasonal landing page, a short campaign. Using 302 for a permanent move delays consolidation, sometimes for a long time.

307 — temporary, method preserved. The temporary counterpart of 308.

410 — gone. The right answer for content that is deliberately removed with no equivalent. It says "this is finished" rather than "this is missing", and it is processed faster than a 404.

Use 301 unless you have a specific reason not to. Cached 301s are hard to reverse, so be sure before deploying one.

Redirect to the closest equivalent

The destination should be somewhere the visitor actually wanted to be:

• A retired service goes to the replacement service, not the homepage
• A discontinued product goes to its successor or its category
• A closed location goes to the nearest open one, saying so on the page
• An expired promotion goes to the current offer or the relevant service

Redirecting everything to the homepage is the classic error. It is treated as a soft 404, and to the visitor it looks like the site is broken.

If nothing equivalent exists, 410 is more honest than a redirect to a page nobody asked for.

Implement in one layer

Redirect rules in several places at once produce chains and loops. Pick one layer — server config, application routing, or a plugin — and keep everything there. Where a CDN also has rules, document what lives where.

Order matters: most systems stop at the first match, so specific rules go before pattern rules.

Test before and after deployment

Check each rule end to end, following the whole chain:

curl -sIL -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code} %{num_redirects} %{url_effective}\n' \
  https://example.com/old-service-page

You want the final status 200, the redirect count 1, and the destination the URL you intended. More than one hop means a chain to flatten.

Also test that the destination itself is not redirecting, and that the rule has not accidentally matched more URLs than intended.

Update your own links

A redirect handles links you do not control. Links on your own site should be corrected to point at the new URL directly — navigation, in-body links, sitemaps, footer lists, and anything hard-coded in a template.

The sitemap in particular should list only final destinations.

Keep them

Redirects are not temporary infrastructure. External links, printed material and bookmarks keep referencing old URLs for years — and for a Pasadena trade business with a URL on a vehicle or a yard sign, that can be a very long time. Removing an old rule to tidy the file is how traffic quietly disappears.