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THOUGHTS / BEGINNERS GUIDE 12 Jun 2026 7 MIN READ

What Is a 301 Redirect? How to Move Pages Without Losing Your Google Ranking

Imagine you have spent two years building up a page on your website that ranks well in Google. People searching for your service find it, click through, and contact you. Then you redesign your website, and in the process the address of that page changes. If nothing is set up to handle the old address, Google arrives at a dead end — and so does every person who had bookmarked it or followed a link from another site. Within weeks, the ranking you spent years earning can be gone. A 301 redirect is the tool that prevents this from happening.

A 301 redirect is an instruction that tells both visitors and Google that a web page has permanently moved to a new address. When someone or something tries to access the old URL, they are automatically sent to the new one — without seeing an error page. The “301” is a technical status code meaning “moved permanently.” For small businesses, the most important times to use a 301 redirect are when you change a page’s URL, redesign your website, move to a new domain, or delete a page that had any Google ranking or incoming links.

Every page on the internet has a unique address called a URL — for example, yourwebsite.co.uk/services/plumbing. Google spends time and resources indexing these addresses and deciding how relevant they are for particular searches. When a URL changes and nothing is set up to handle the old address, Google simply encounters a 404 error (“page not found”) and has to decide what to do with the ranking it assigned to the old URL. Usually, that ranking is lost.

A 301 redirect solves this by acting as an automatic forwarding address. When someone — or Google — visits the old URL, the server instantly sends them to the new one. From the visitor’s perspective, nothing seems to have happened; they just arrive at the right page. From Google’s perspective, the signal is clear: the content has permanently moved, and the search ranking should be transferred to the new address.

Why the Number 301?

Web servers communicate with browsers using numbered codes that describe what happened to a request. You have probably seen a 404 error, which means “not found.” A 200 code means “everything is fine, here is the page.” The 300 range of codes all relate to redirects. A 301 specifically means “this page has moved permanently” — which is the signal that tells Google to transfer the ranking to the new URL. A 302 code, by contrast, means “this page has moved temporarily” — which tells Google to keep checking the old address, because it might come back. Using a 302 when you actually mean a permanent move is a common mistake that can leave your search rankings in an uncertain state for months.

When Do You Actually Need a 301 Redirect?

Not every website change requires redirects, but these situations always do:

  • Moving to a new domain name. If your business rebrands and your website moves from oldname.co.uk to newname.co.uk, every page on the old domain should redirect to its equivalent on the new one. This is one of the highest-stakes scenarios — done properly, you can carry your Google rankings across to the new domain with relatively little loss; done badly, you may be starting from scratch.
  • Redesigning your website. Website redesigns often involve reorganising pages and changing URL structures. A service that was at /services/painting might move to /painting-decorating after a redesign. Without a 301 redirect, anyone who had bookmarked the old address, or any other website that had linked to it, reaches a dead end.
  • Changing a page’s URL for any reason. Even a small change — fixing a typo in a URL, simplifying a long address, removing the date from a blog post URL — creates a broken link if a redirect is not set up. Google treats the old and new URLs as completely different pages unless you tell it otherwise.
  • Deleting a page that had any incoming links or ranking. If you remove a page that other websites linked to, or that ranked for any search terms, those links and rankings are wasted unless you redirect the old URL to the most relevant page on your site. Even redirecting to your homepage is better than leaving a 404 error.
  • Consolidating duplicate pages. Some websites accidentally end up with multiple versions of the same content — for example, yourdomain.co.uk/contact and yourdomain.co.uk/contact-us both showing the same page. Google can be uncertain which version to rank. A 301 redirect from one to the other resolves this cleanly.

How Do You Set Up a 301 Redirect?

The method depends on how your website is built and hosted:

  • WordPress. A plugin called Redirection (free) lets you add and manage 301 redirects through a simple settings panel — no code required. You enter the old URL and the new URL, save it, and the redirect is live immediately.
  • Squarespace. Has a built-in URL redirects panel in settings. You can add as many redirects as you need through the interface without touching any code.
  • Wix. Also has a built-in redirects manager under Marketing and SEO settings. The same principle applies: old URL, new URL, save.
  • Custom-built or hand-coded websites. Redirects are typically set up in a configuration file on the web server, or through the hosting control panel. If your site is hosted on Apache servers, this is done in a file called .htaccess; on Nginx servers it is done in the server configuration. If you have a developer, this is a five-minute task for them. If you are managing hosting yourself, most hosting control panels (cPanel, Cloudflare, Netlify) have a redirects interface that does not require editing server files directly.

How to Check Whether Your Redirects Are Working

Once you have set up a redirect, it is worth verifying it is working correctly. The simplest method is to type the old URL into a browser and check that you end up at the new page. For a more precise check, a free tool called Redirect Checker (search for it — there are several good ones) will show you the exact status code being returned, confirming whether it is a 301 (permanent), 302 (temporary), or something else entirely. Google Search Console will also flag any crawl errors caused by 404s, so keeping an eye on that after a site change is a good habit.

Redirects are one of those behind-the-scenes details that most visitors never think about — because when they are done correctly, there is nothing to notice. But for small businesses that have built up any presence in Google over time, they are one of the most important things to get right when making changes to a website. The cost of not having them is invisible until it is not — and by then, the rankings may already be gone.

Frequently asked

Will a 301 redirect preserve my Google ranking completely?
Almost, but not quite. Google has confirmed that 301 redirects pass the vast majority of a page’s search ranking to the new URL — estimates from SEO professionals suggest around 90 to 99 per cent of the ranking signals are transferred. There is typically a temporary dip in rankings while Google processes the change, which can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks depending on how often Google crawls your site. For most small businesses, the difference is negligible compared to the alternative of having no redirect at all, which results in the ranking being lost entirely.
What is the difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect?
A 301 tells Google the move is permanent — transfer the ranking to the new URL and stop checking the old one. A 302 tells Google the move is temporary — keep the old URL in the index because the page may come back. If you are moving a page permanently (which is the case in almost every practical scenario), always use a 301. Using a 302 by mistake is one of the most common technical SEO errors, and it can leave your rankings stuck at the old URL indefinitely, meaning the new page takes much longer to rank.
Do I need redirects if my old pages were never ranking well?
It depends on why you are changing them. If a page never ranked for anything and has no incoming links from other websites, losing it will have no measurable impact on your Google visibility. However, it is still worth redirecting it if you think anyone might have bookmarked it, if it appears in your email marketing or printed materials, or if it is linked from within your own website. A visitor hitting a 404 error on a page they expected to find is a poor experience regardless of the SEO impact.
What happens if I move my entire website to a new domain without redirects?
Every page on your old domain that had a Google ranking will effectively disappear from search. Google will find the old URLs returning 404 errors, deindex them over time, and encounter the new domain as if it were a brand new website with no history. Building back up can take months or even years. Moving to a new domain without proper 301 redirects in place is one of the most significant SEO mistakes a business can make. If you are considering a domain change, discuss the redirect strategy with whoever is managing your website before the move happens — not after.

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