People often use a tool like Redirection to help with site reorganisation. For example, changing your permalink structure, or moving from a different tool to WordPress.
Once you’ve created redirects for this task a common question is how long do you need to keep them around for?
The simple answer is that a redirect should exist as long as anyone might visit the old URL.
Let’s break that down a bit.
The are two main reasons for creating redirects when migrating your pages:
- To update search engines with new URLs
- To ensure direct access doesn’t 404
Assuming everything is set up correctly, search engines will eventually update their index. Once this happens the redirects don’t need to exist anymore – their job is complete.
Direct access is a more complicated matter. As long as the potential exists for someone to access your site directly then a redirect will be needed. People may have bookmarked links, shared them in emails or social media, and they may be referenced on other websites and in advertising.
There is a common misconception that having a lot of redirects will slow your site down, or that it is in some way ‘messy’. This isn’t the case, and as it essentially costs nothing to keep a redirect the simplest solution is just to leave them until the possibility of direct access is zero.
If the possibility will never be zero they probably should remain.
If you do want to clean out redirects you can use the ‘last access‘ feature in Redirection to tell you when a redirect was last used. If, after a sufficient period of time has passed, you decide there is no possibility of anyone accessing that redirect then it’s probably safe to remove.
Of course, this is just a general rule, and your site may have different needs. It doesn’t cost anything to keep a redirect around, but if you do delete redirects the 404 log can help identify if they need to be restored.