When redesigning your website, make sure your web developer implements URL redirects from the old web pages to the new ones. If they ignore the redirects, much of your regular traffic will come to a crashing halt as web links on the web and personal bookmarks to your website become invalid.
A URL Redirect is best defined as an automatic link from one website or page, to another. You need to implement URL redirects in ANY redesign project so that other sites linking to your page, and people that have bookmarked your page, can still access the web page without getting a “page not found” error.
The Scenerio:
- Old web link to your contact page was http://www.business.com/contact.htm
- New web link your redesign firm has created for the contact page is http://www.business.com/contact-us.php
- A popular blog that gets 1,000 view per day wrote an article about your product 6 months ago and they included a link to your contact page so people can easily click the link and get in touch with you. This one blog page has brought you over 100 new customers in the past six months.
- The company or individual that redesigned your new website either a.) does not have a clue about redirects, b.) does not want to have to put the extra effort into building all of the redirects, or c.) is trying to make a buck instead of providing your company with an excellent website.
Sometimes you can name pages exactly the same as the old site and avoid the need for redirects, but in many cases such as this one, the old site used static HTML pages and the new site is using a more versatile code that requires the page name to change from .htm to .php. That means the link that the blogger posted which brought you over 100 new customers now becomes useless. Over the next six months you’ll begin to wonder why your new fancy website isn’t doing very well, and that hang up will be directly related to not installing URL redirects.
The Need
What needs to happen, is a URL redirect needs to be created for EVERY old web page. That redirect needs to point to the correctly corresponding page on the new website.
It’s a pain. I know, but make sure the one in charge of your web redesign projects understands the importance of using URL redirects. It’s VERY easy to brush it off and ignore them, because it’s the kind of thing that’s behind the scenes and the end client won’t know anything about the need for them.
