Redirect maps
beat 404s.

The most expensive line in a redesign is the one nobody draws: what happens to the URLs that already exist. Search engines, saved links, and printed materials all point at the old addresses. A launch that forgets them starts its life paying rent on lost equity.

Our rule is to resolve the URL map before the design exists. On one property this week, the archive's permalinks mapped one-to-one to the new structure — so the redirect map is empty by design, which is better than any redirect. On another, two hundred legacy URLs were carried into a generated map and shipped as part of the build, tested in the same pass as the pages themselves.

The discipline is simple to state and easy to skip: export every address, decide its successor, ship the map with the site, and test it like a page — because to the visitor and the crawler, it is one.

Method note from the practice's September 2026 migrations. The maps themselves are in each site's repository.