What is a redirect map?
A redirect map pairs every important current URL with its destination on the new site. How Goodspeed drafts, signs off and tests one on a migration.
Founder of Goodspeed
A redirect map is the list that says, for each important URL on the current site, where a visitor or a search engine should land on the new site. In practice it is a spreadsheet or a table: old path, new path, redirect type (almost always a 301 redirect), and a note if the page has no exact equivalent.
It is not a nice-to-have at the end of a redesign. It is the document that protects bookmarks, backlinks and search listings when URLs change. Without it, a website migration is a guess.
Why does a redirect map matter?
Most ranking loss after a rebuild comes from changed or retired URLs with no considered destination. A map forces the team to decide, in advance, what happens to every live address, including PDFs, filtered indexes you care about, and old campaign pages that still attract links.
It also stops the lazy default of sending everything to the homepage, which looks like a soft 404 and wastes the relevance of the original page.
How does Goodspeed handle a redirect map?
We crawl the current site, export the URL list, and draft the map before visual design is finished. Your team signs it off. We implement it on staging, test a sample of old URLs, and watch Search Console for 404s in the first 30 days after launch. You can run a first pass yourself with the migration planner, which reads your sitemap and flags which paths can stay and which need a 301.
The same steps are published as our SEO migration checklist. Migrations start from $10,000 and include the map, on-page parity and that first month of monitoring.
What does a typical redirect map look like in practice?
A company is moving /blog/ to /insights/ and retiring a dated product line. Every live post gets a 1:1 301 to the new slug. The blog index points at the new index. Retired product pages point at the nearest current product, not at the homepage. A handful of campaign URLs that no longer have a home are listed as deliberate 404s or as redirects to a parent category, and that decision is written down rather than left to launch week.
What are the common mistakes?
- Starting the map after the new URLs have already shipped.
- Redirecting every retired URL to the homepage.
- Mapping only the main nav, and missing blog posts, files and parameter URLs that still attract traffic.
- Using a 302 because a plugin made it the default.
- Taking the redirects down a few weeks after launch.
Common questions
What is a redirect map?
A redirect map is a signed-off list that pairs every important URL on the current site with its destination on the new site, usually as a permanent 301. It is the document that stops a migration from creating hundreds of preventable 404s.
Who should sign off the redirect map?
The people who own the site and the search traffic, not only the developers. On our projects the map is a named deliverable that you review before launch, because a wrong destination is expensive to discover afterwards.
Can the migration planner replace a full redirect map?
The planner is a useful first pass. It can read a sitemap, group URLs and flag which paths can stay. A full map still needs a crawl, judgement on pages with no equivalent, and your sign-off. We do that as part of a migration.
How much does a migration that includes a redirect map cost?
Website migrations with us start from $10,000. That figure includes the audit, the signed-off map, on-page parity and the first 30 days of monitoring.
Which related terms should you read next?
If you already know the route, start at the matching guide, such as WordPress to Framer or Webflow to Framer.
You can also browse the glossary, the resources hub, try the migration planner, or book a call.
About the Author
Founder of Goodspeed
Harish Malhi is the founder of Goodspeed. He left Google in 2019 to build his own product, and started Goodspeed to give other founders the same head start. Today the studio designs and builds websites and the whole digital experience around them for funded tech companies, at the moments that matter: a raise, a launch, a press cycle. Goodspeed is a Framer Enterprise Expert, was Bubble’s Agency of the Year in 2024, and has shipped 300+ products, including launch pages for an NVIDIA-backed AI lab and a Webby-nominated site for a Boeing-backed aviation company. It holds a 5.0 rating from 46 reviews on Clutch.
