You have been using a website for long and adding value to it complete with SEO and digital marketing. Now when you plan a total revamp of your web design, one of the most difficult things to forego is the SEO rank and brand loyalty you have earned over years of investing on white hat SEO techniques. But you can make the most of your existing SEO rank and a swanky new design by setting up permanent 301 Redirects with the help of an experienced Offshore Web Design & Development Company. But before you do that, here are some basics you need to know about the 301 redirects. Though your outsourcing partner will take care of the redesigning part and the techniques applied, it is in the best of your business’ interest to understand what you are paying them for.
When and how can 301 Redirects help?
Usually, 301 redirects are used when you are revamping your host, design or moving on to a non www version of your existing site. It can be used when you change the website directory also. The point is that 301 redirects are used when moving permanently and not temporarily to another host or site. So if your requirement is temporary, 301 redirects are not advised. Otherwise, they help you retain your website SEO rank which is very precious and takes a long time to build. Once your new website is ready, the Web Development Company will set the redirects carefully to make sure that you don’t lose your existing followers.
How to set up 301 redirects?
Depending upon your server and host, you can set up the 301 redirects in these ways:
- Identify the URLs to be redirected – This is the first step for setting the redirects. First make a list of all the URLs that you are planning to redirect into a new page or host. Though Google lets you hop across 4 to 5 pages at one go, it increases the latency and also becomes difficult to manage. Competent Web Development Companies in India will restrict the redirect to a single level as far as possible.
- Create a Redirect Map – Creating the mapping to where each URL should be redirected is the next step. This can be quite tedious especially if the revamp involves a major change in design that affects more or most of the pages on your website. This is usually done using Excel or such software that lets you organize the information categorically. This usually works well when a directory change is involved.
- Setting the redirects on WordPress – WordPress comes with an amazing plug-in that you can download and use to set up the 301 redirect links. The code is automatically added and managed by WordPress.
How to set the redirects when migrating to a new platform?
This will be the most challenging aspect of setting up the redirects. If your source URLs have codes and numbers, it will be very difficult to decode them and identify the destination URL. That’s when the outsourcing Offshore Web Design services come extremely resourceful. They help identify the source and destination mappings through careful pattern-searching and matching and handle the redirection also.