Adding redirects before a redirect domain is connected

Marketing & Content Content Strategy & SEO
1

I’m getting this question a lot at the moment and I’m wondering if anyone has experience with this.

When migrating a website onto HubSpot CMS and setting it up as the primary domain or retiring an existing website and setting it up as a redirect URL, is it possible to have the 301 redirects uploaded prior or in concurrence with the domain swap over - or does the domain need to be active in HubSpot before any redirects can be uploaded.

I’m looking to minimise/negate any downtime or SEO ramifications.

Does anyone have other solutions here?

2

Hey @MaxAllen, thank you for posting in our Community!

You can indeed set up 301 redirects before or in concurrence with the domain swap over in HubSpot. This allows you to minimize downtime and mitigate any potential SEO ramifications effectively. Within the Redirects tool, you can manually input the old URLs and specify their corresponding new URLs. Make sure to set them as 301 redirects, indicating a permanent move. Alternatively, if you have a large number of redirects, you can upload a CSV file containing the redirect mappings. (More information here)

To our top experts, @Jnix284 @RatulRahman and @DSharma02 do you have any recommendations for @MaxAllen?

Thank you,

Pam

3

thanks for the tag @PamCotton, happy to help with best practices @MaxAllen

Unfortunately, it’s actually not possible to create redirects before a domain is connected.

HubSpot only allows you to create redirects for domains connected to HubSpot (otherwise you could create redirects for domains you don’t own).

You’ll get this error if you try adding redirects ahead of time:

Jnix284_0-1712186624587.png
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Here’s what I recommend and follow for website migrations:

1 - export existing redirects within HubSpot, if any (this usually happens when you’re staging pages and change content slugs) or if you have other assets like blogs or landing pages connected.

2 - use the export (or this sample CSV) to create you redirect import file

3 - export redirects from your current CMS and add them to your import sheet

4 - scrub all existing redirects to make sure you don’t create a string of redirects (multiple redirects can prevent the page from loading e.g. redirect 1 = page A → page B, redirect 2 = page B → page C - causing page A to go to B then to C)

5 - add any new redirects as a result of the migration, combining content, depricating content, etc.

6 - publish all of your migrated content to the staging domain

7 - connect your DNS (do this during your low traffic time)

8 - complete all of your QA testing, it’s best to test all of your internal/external links and run the SEO scan for broken links before you import your redirects - this helps you catch anything that might be missed if there’s a redirect in place

9 - import your redirects

10 - verify your site map, robots.txt, and no-index tags for LPs

11 - submit your sitemap.xml to Google Search Console

Steps 7-11 should happen within a 1-3 hour window.

Unless your website is a massive enterprise website with domain authority like HubSpot or Amazon…a few hours won’t cause any SEO issue because the redirects aren’t loaded yet because Google won’t bother to re-index your website until you submit a new sitemap via GSC and even then, it is likely to take days, weeks, months before it’s fully indexed depending on your domain authority and the index queue…