Redirect map

What a redirect map is

A redirect map is a table with one row per legacy URL. Each row carries the decision: keep the same path, redirect to a specific new page, remove the page, or send it to human review. Redirects are written with their status code, tested against the rebuilt site, and kept after launch as the record of the migration.

What it does and does not control

The map controls where old addresses lead. It prevents the common migration failure where a page moves and its old URL returns a 404, and it lets a redirect chain be flattened into one hop. It does not control how a search engine treats a redirect, how long the old URL remains in an index, or how quickly a change is noticed. Those are observations to record, not promises to make.

How to build one

Start from a crawl of the live site and from its sitemap. Group URLs by template, then decide per group: an identical path, a close replacement, or a deliberate removal. Anything ambiguous goes to review rather than a guessed destination. Then follow every redirect on the new site and confirm a single hop to a page that returns 200.

Where it fits in the product

The migration pipeline writes the map before cutover and keeps it with the change set. The free redirect-map checker is the same idea at a smaller scale: paste two URL lists and see which paths are preserved, which have a plausible destination and which have none.