Redirect Map Builder

What it's for

When a site moves or its pages are renamed, every old address needs a redirect to its new one, or visitors and search engines land on “page not found” and the old pages’ standing in search is lost. This turns a list of old and new addresses, such as a spreadsheet column pair, into the rules your server or host needs, and checks the list for the mistakes that break redirects.

For example, when you rebuild a WordPress site as a static site on Netlify, export the old page list, put each new address beside it, paste both columns here and save the result as _redirects.

How to use it

Paste one redirect a line: the old address, then the new one, separated by a comma, tab or space (so columns copied from a spreadsheet work), and a status code after them if that line needs a different one. A heading line is skipped, and a full old address keeps only its path and query (?id=5).

To start from the old site’s sitemap.xml, paste the whole file: it becomes one line for each page it lists, and you type each page’s new address after its comma. A sitemap index only lists other sitemaps, so paste those.

• An old address ending in * covers everything under it; a * in the new address puts back the part it matched, as in /blog/*,/news/*.
• Choose the server or host under For, and the usual status: 301 for a permanent move (the normal choice), 302 or 307 for a temporary one.
• Point chains straight at their end rewrites a redirect to a page that is itself redirected so it goes straight to the last one.

Duplicates, loops and redirects to themselves are listed above the rules. Copy them, or Save as a file with the name the host expects (a saved .htaccess may need renaming, as some systems hide or rename files whose names start with a dot). The settings are remembered in this browser.

Example

Press Try an example, or paste:

old,new
/about-us,/about
/about,/company
https://www.example.com/team.php?id=5,/company/team
/blog/*,/news/*
/press,https://news.example.org/,302

With For set to Apache, it notes that /about-us → /about → /company is a chain, and gives RedirectMatch 301 ^/about-us$ /company, a RewriteCond and RewriteRule pair for the query, RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/(.*)$ /news/$1 and a 302 for /press.

Good to know

Netlify’s and Cloudflare Pages’ _redirects can’t match one exact query, so those lines come out as comments. For nginx, paste the rules inside the site’s server { } block; the query rules use if, which is safe there because it only returns. Chains and loops are only found among the addresses in your list, and only where the new address is a path on the same site.