Your redirect rules
Paste a list of old and new addresses and this tool writes one permanent 301 redirect rule per row, in the format your server or platform expects. Before it hands you the rules, it checks the whole list for loops, for rows that land on another redirect, for several old pages sent to the homepage and for old addresses that appear twice. Everything runs in your browser, so the URLs you paste are not sent to me.
How to use it
- Build the list from the old site, not from memory. Include every address that has had visits, earned links or appeared in the old XML sitemap, not only the pages in the menu.
- Paste one pair per line: old address first, new address second. Paths such as /about-us.html and full addresses both work.
- Choose the format your hosting uses. If you are not sure, ask your web developer or host which server the site runs on.
- Create the rules, read the warnings, correct the list and run it again until no warnings remain apart from the reminder to test.
- Copy the rules onto a staging copy of the new site first, never straight onto the live one.
Decide where each old address goes
The rules are only as good as the decisions behind them, so sort every old URL into one of four groups before you paste anything.
- Same content, new address. Redirect it to the new address. This is most of a typical rebuild.
- Merged into another page. Redirect it to the page that now answers the same question, so the visitor and the link equity from any sites pointing at it both arrive somewhere relevant.
- Removed, with nothing equivalent. Leave it out of the map and let it return 410 Gone or a plain 404. That is an honest answer, and Google handles it cleanly.
- Unchanged. Leave it out. A row that points an address at itself creates a loop.
The temptation on a big rebuild is to send everything awkward to the homepage. Google tends to treat that as a soft 404, so the old page keeps none of its value and the visitor lands somewhere that does not answer their search. The tool warns you when more than one row does it.
Reading the warnings
Loops
A redirect loop happens when the rules send an address back to somewhere it has already been, such as /a/ to /b/ and /b/ back to /a/. Browsers give up with a “too many redirects” error and the pages cannot be reached at all. The tool prints the cycle so you can see which row to change.
Chains
A redirect chain is a row whose destination is itself being redirected, so the visitor takes two or more hops. Each hop adds a delay, and search engines may stop following a long chain. Point every row at the final address. Chains often come from an earlier rebuild, so if the current site already has redirects in place, paste those rows in too and the tool will catch chains across both sets.
Repeated rows and skipped lines
When the same old address appears twice, the tool counts it and checks loops and chains against the later destination, but both rows still appear in the rules. A server acts on whichever rule it meets first, so delete the row you did not mean before you copy anything. Lines without two addresses are skipped and counted.
Where the rules go
Apache or LiteSpeed. Many UK shared hosting plans run one of these, and both read the .htaccess file in the site’s root folder. On WordPress, paste the rules outside the # BEGIN WordPress and # END WordPress markers, because WordPress rewrites everything between them when the permalink settings are saved. These rules also match everything below a path: a row for /blog will catch /blog/any-post as well. Apache uses the first rule that matches, so put the longer, more specific rows above the short ones.
Nginx. The rules belong in the site’s server block. That is usually a job for your developer or host, who should test the configuration before reloading the server.
CSV. Use this for a WordPress redirect plugin or a platform that imports a two-column file. The file the tool writes has the headers “source” and “target”, so check the column names your importer expects and rename them if needed; Shopify’s redirect import, for example, wants “Redirect from” and “Redirect to”.
What the tool cannot check
- It does not visit any URL, so it cannot confirm that each destination loads, or spot redirects already sitting on the live server.
- It drops the domain from every full address, old and new, and keeps only the path and any query string. That suits a rebuild on the same domain. When you move to a new domain, the rules run on the old domain and must point at full addresses on the new one, so add the new domain to each destination in the copied rules or ask your developer for a domain-wide rule.
- Neither server format matches on a query string, so an old address such as /product.php?id=12 needs a rewrite rule written by hand.
- It treats /services and /services/ as two different addresses. Match the trailing slash and the letter case your new site actually serves.
- The tool splits every row on commas as well as tabs, so an address that contains a comma breaks its row even when the pair is tab-separated. Encode the comma as %2C or write those few rules by hand.
Test before launch, check after it
On staging, run the old address list through a crawler in list mode. Every row should return a single 301 followed by a page that loads. On launch day, repeat the crawl on the live site, then watch the page indexing and not-found reports in Google Search Console over the following weeks. Update your own menus and internal links to the new addresses directly, so the redirects are left to serve old backlinks, bookmarks and search results. Google’s guidance on site moves with URL changes recommends keeping redirects in place for at least a year.
The rest of the launch sequence, from robots.txt to analytics, is in my website launch SEO checklist.
Next step
A redirect map is one part of moving a site safely. If the site you are replacing brings in a steady share of your enquiries, my website migration SEO service covers the inventory, the mapping, staging checks and the weeks after launch. If you would rather start with a second opinion, send me the site through the free SEO audit and I will tell you what I would check first.