What are Redirects?
A redirect is a process of forwarding traffic and users from one URL to another. Instead of landing on the page they intended, users are redirected to a URL of the website owner’s choosing. Redirects are used for a variety of reasons such as moving content or pages around your site, moving your content to a new URL, deleting pages, changing domain names or merging websites, creating a temporary holding page while a new design is being worked on, etc.
Often, people ask us to redirect a website from either a non-existent Carleton site, or to forward an old address. We discourage the use of redirects for the reasons listed below:
Misleading to SEO
While implementing redirects help users avoid running into 404 errors, many SEOs mishandle them, leading to increasing loading time and lowered site rankings.
Redirect chains occur when multiple redirects have been setup between the intended URL and the actual URL that users land on. These chains are problematic for both SEO and visitors’ experience. Each redirect will result in increased loading time, meaning a decrease in the number of times and/or frequency with which a site is crawled (this is known as crawl budget). Both of these will lead to some of your pages not being indexed by Google, resulting in a much lower chance of being ranked highly.
Misleading to Users
In addition to SEO, these kinds of redirect mistakes can worsen the visitors’ experience of using your site. The slower site speed caused by redirects can make traversing through your website an aggravating experience. Site speed has proven to have a high correlation with conversion rates. A user’s first impression with a website is one of the most important factors in whether they’ll become a customer. Users will click on a link to their desired page only to wait to be redirected multiple times, souring their view of your site. A negative initial experience will decrease the likelihood of users reaching your product/services page and in turn becoming customers. Additionally, users will have to remember two or more addresses depending on the number of redirects, making visiting your website even more troublesome.
After a page or site has been redirected, they are often published on print materials and widely distributed. The problem that is often encountered is that many redirects are temporary, meaning that when they are removed, the print materials are outdated. Creating and printing what could be thousands of copies of collateral only for them to be out of date within months is a major waste of time and resources.
Another issue we run into is when people ask for uppercase redirects. URLs are case-sensitive meaning they differentiate between capital and lowercase letters. If a URL is all uppercase or partially uppercase, it can greatly impact a site’s performance. Most people naturally presume URLs are lowercase, so if your site has a combination of both uppercase and lowercase, you’re making it much harder for users to remember your address.
Despite all of this, if you must have a redirect, please ensure that you decide a time limit for how long the redirect will remain active. We need to review after 3 to 6 months, so we recommend that during this time you determine a strategy to get the word out of your redirect and how long it will be active for. Additionally, we advise against printing the redirect address without asking us if we can even do the redirect in the first place. Imagine printing 5000 items only to find someone at Carleton has already taken the address you have printed on your poster.