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Website Redesign - What to do with old 301 URLs?
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My current site is on wordpress. We are currently designing a new wordpress site, with the same URLs.
Our current approach is to go into the server, delete the current website files and ad the new website files.
My current site has old urls which are 301 redirected to current urls. Here is my question. In the current redesign process, do i need to create pages for old the 301 redirected urls so that we do not lose them in the launch of the new site? or is the 301 command currently existing outside of our server so this does not matter?
Thank you in advance.
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your redirects has to be in your server if not it'd be hard to manage that by yourself.
What you ahve to be sure is how those redirects have been done.
If they're on a dedicated HTACCESS, then it would be fine as, like you said, you'll ba mainitainig hte exact same URL structure, but if they're maintained by a WP plulgin or JS, be sure to not ovverwrite it, or if you want to get rid of it, export your rules and rewrite them on your htaccess.
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Hi there
If you are keeping your URL structure the same, then you should not have to update your redirects file, so long as all of the destination pages are staying in place. If you are removing any current URLs and those have pages being redirected to them, you will have to update that in your redirects file.
I would do a backlink audit for the old URLs, however, and see if any are worth updating to their new URLs so the new URLs can get equity.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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