Nobody plans for redirects

Until users can't find anything, partners complain, and Google traffic disappears.

We were running a content audit for a client preparing to migrate their docs to a new platform. Standard work: pull every published URL into a spreadsheet, group by section, flag what to keep, what to merge, what to drop.

Then we cross-referenced their analytics. A handful of old URLs were responsible for most of the search traffic to the site. Pages that had ranked well for years, that partners linked to, that customers had bookmarked. None of those URLs would exist on the new site.

If we’d launched without a redirect plan, they would have lost months of search traffic overnight. Customer bookmarks would break. Partner integrations would point to dead pages.

Most of the energy in a migration goes into the new platform. What it looks like, how it’s organized, what tech stack to use, where to host it… The old URLs barely come up.

But you’re not just moving content. You’re moving content that other people have linked to, in places you don’t control. Search engines, partner sites, support emails, bookmarks, internal wikis. You can’t update any of those. The only thing you can do is make sure the URLs they point to still resolve.

So if you’re planning a docs migration, ask one question: what happens to every existing URL?

Whether you’re reviewing a plan from a vendor or running the project internally, this is the check that matters. If nobody on the team can answer it, redirects aren’t going to happen. They’ll get pushed to “after launch” and never come back.

The new site can be perfect. But every old URL that breaks costs you traffic, support tickets, and a bit of trust.