If you're migrating a website and domain from another platform, 301 redirects preserve your old URLs by redirecting them to your new ones. Your search engine rank for that page is preserved and you don't lose traffic.
Why is this important? Web hosts use different technologies and codebases, so your old website pages might have had a totally different file extension, like .php, .html, or even no file extension at all.
For example, let’s say you had a page called Contact Us on your old site, and the URL was yourdomain.com/contact-us/php. Your new site also has a Contact Us page with the URL yourdomain.com/contact-us. You can use the page redirect feature to ensure traffic to that old contact-us.php link is redirected to the new contact-us page.
Set Up a URL Redirect for a Single Page
You'll find the option to configure 301 redirects in the settings for each page. Open your site in the editor and select the page you want to work with from the pages list.
Click the gear icon and select page settings, then click the toggle to enable redirects. Next, enter the old page name into the redirect field and click save. Publish your site to make the changes live, and you’re done.
What if your old URLs were not as simple, such as yourdomain.com/site/pages/contact-us.php?form=2? Not a problem - you simply need to enter everything after the “yourdomain.com/” part of the URL, so in the example above you would enter: site/pages/contact-us.php?form=2.
Note: There are some URLs that may not work with redirects, such as yourdomain.com/pages/picture.jpg or yourdomain.com/document.pdf.
Set Up URL Redirects for Multiple Pages
You can also quickly set up redirects for multiple pages from your dashboard. Go to Website > SEO & Social Media and click the “Add redirects” button in the URL Redirects section.
Enter the old page URL in the box on the left (e.g. contact-us.php) and select the new page from the list on the right. Use the Add Another link to create more redirects, then save when you’re finished.
