Redirects; what are they and what do they mean for my website?

302, 301, 200, 404: no, we’re not talking about FC Emmen’s match results. In this blog we want to take you into the wondrous world of your website’s status codes, which can be of great importance not only for your findability but also the user experience. What, for example, is a 301 redirect or a 404?

What is a redirect?

Let’s start at the beginning; a redirect is a pointer from one page to another. A redirect was created to send users and search engines (also called crawlers) from, for example, an old page to a new one. When, for example, you’ve changed the URL of your homepage from your-company.nl/homepage to your-company.nl/home, you can set a 301 redirect. This automatically forwards users and search engines, without you losing traffic. How handy is that!
Another well-known one is the 302. You can, for example, set this when your website is under maintenance, because a 302 indicates a ‘temporary move’. For example, when you temporarily use a maintenance page as your homepage because you’ve just had a beautiful new website developed by Webba.
Perhaps the best known of all is the 404, although it isn’t so much a redirect as an error code. A 404 usually pops up when the page you’re trying to access doesn’t exist, or no longer exists, and no other redirect (301 or 302) has been set. Many companies, often webshops, make effective use of the space such an extra page offers and place links there to relevant products related to the keywords in the URL, or place a little ‘joke’.

Risks of redirects: on a leash!

Sounds handy, simply redirecting old pages to new ones. However, it also carries risks, such as a redirect chain. This term is used to indicate when a URL has to make several ‘hops’ to reach its final destination. A redirect chain takes up ‘crawl budget’, meaning a search engine like Google can’t retrieve your pages as well. It can then happen that your page falls out of the search results, or that a change is processed less quickly.
On top of that, it can slow down your website, because your internet browser has to go along several digital addresses to retrieve the desired information. This can cause users to drop off early, and nobody’s happy about that, of course!
Want to know even more about redirects, redirect chains, or would you rather have us solve it for you? Come by Webba for a coffee sometime! Then we’ll only redirect you once, to the right person 😉 .