What is a 301 redirect?
A permanent forward from an old address to a new one. It carries the old page's authority and keeps its visitors, which is why every URL that changes needs one.
A 301 redirect sends anyone who asks for an old address, whether a person or Google, straight to a new one, and tells them the move is permanent. A 302 does the same job but says the move is temporary, which is why the two should not be mixed up.
The reason it matters is that a page builds up value over time: links from other sites, bookmarks, its standing in search. Change a page’s address without a redirect and all of that points at a dead page. Visitors get an error, the links pass nothing, and the ranking the old page had earned is gone.
This is where most website rebuilds go wrong. The new site looks better, the addresses change, nobody maps the old ones to the new, and traffic falls off a cliff a few weeks after launch. Every address that changes needs a redirect to its closest match, and it is worth doing before the new site goes live rather than after the traffic has gone. We walk through it in our guide to migrating from Wix to WordPress.
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