Can I delete original site after implementing 301 redirects?

  • I am moving domains completely. I have successfully moved WordPress entirely to the the new domain and I’m getting ready to start implementing 301 redirect for each individual URL on the website (Google reccommends doing this rather than doing a blanket redirect on the domain name).

    My question is not directly-WP related as it could be applied to non-WP sites, but it is about WP which is why I ask it here.

    Once the redirects have taken place, can I simply delete the original website? Will the redirects still work when the original site is not there?

    If anyone has experience redirecting an entire WordPress site I would really appreciate any info & tips on how you carried it out.

    Thanks,

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • are you doing it through htaccess? you should be. if you are then yes you can remove everything besides htaccess. your code should look like:

    Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    and it is a “blanket” redirect but as far as any search engine is concerned it’s any page’s individual url. it would be ridiculously counter intuitive to hard code each existing url.

    Thread Starter dominoeffect

    (@dominoeffect)

    simplistik, I was taking my info from this google webmasters post:

    Don’t do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience.

    Do you think I’ve interpreted it wrongly?

    Thanks for the help.

    Got ya, I see. Well personally, I know that 301 are completely valid redirects. What I think this is saying though, is to try not to completely redirect traffic to say the homepage, a many-to-one relationship. So if someone goes to

    oldsite.com/page1
    oldsite.com/page2
    oldsite.com/page3

    etc

    it doesn’t just go to

    newsite.com/

    it should have a 1 to 1 relationship, so what they want is for

    oldsite.com/page1
    oldsite.com/page2
    oldsite.com/page3

    to goto

    newsite.com/page1
    newsite.com/page2
    newsite.com/page3

    I believe that’s all they’re warning you from, however with WordPress if you try to go to newsite.com/page2 and it doesn’t exist, it’ll give a 301 permanent redirect to a 404 page, which to me, is completely valid if the article/page doesn’t exist anymore. Ultimately though, manually typing each and every url/uri in for a redirect on your site would be a pain in the arse to maintain. And this is just my opinion of course. However, I’ve never seen anyone do manual redirects to all their pages.

    Thread Starter dominoeffect

    (@dominoeffect)

    Yeah I seen your point. I’m actually having some problems with 301’s taking effect with a couple of test redirects I tried out, so I’ll have to see if I can sort that out before I proceed anyway.

    Thanks for the input and I’ll keep this thread updated.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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