Change URLs when relaunching website?

Relaunching a website can be an overwhelming project. You need a new design and perhaps new functionalities. What should you do with your existing content? And what about new content? The more changes you want, the more challenging it gets.

In this process, you might face the question if you should change or keep your URLs. If you’re focusing your eCommerce site on different products, or if you’re rebranding or changing the name of your products, you may fear you don’t have a choice but to redirect. But is that really the case? And are there pressing reasons to avoid redirecting, other than the amount of work?

Taisia Fredrickson sent us her question on the subject:

“We want to change the titles of all of our products as we are relaunching our website and adding new products. Could we do this, but keep the same slug/URL? We would have to redirect our complete product catalog (which is massive) in order to change the URLs, from what our developer says.

Check out the video or read the answer below!

Change URLs during relaunch or not

“I would always, if you can, keep the URLs exactly the way they are. Even if you’re changing the names of your products. Only if it’s really weird for people, then I would change them on a product by product basis. But if you can, keep the URLs the same, so you don’t have to redirect them.

Because people will have links pointing to these existing URLs. Redirection can always cause errors, because you can make a mistake somewhere, or you might lose stuff. So if you can prevent having to redirect it all, I would not redirect.

Good luck!”

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