Years of match reports, player pages and history pages are why Google sends people to your club’s website. Launch a new site with new addresses and no plan, and every one of those old links points to an error page. Rankings drop, and fans who bookmarked the fixtures page hit a dead end.
1. List every address you have now
Before anything changes, crawl the old site and export its sitemap. You want every URL that exists: pages, news articles, player profiles, PDFs. Google Search Console’s pages report will also show which ones actually get visits.
2. Keep what you can
The best redirect is the one you don’t need. If a news article lived at /news/cup-draw/, keep it there on the new site. Moving your archive across rather than starting fresh is what makes this possible — it’s why we carried East Fife’s archive of more than 2,000 articles from its old Joomla site into WordPress.
3. Redirect everything else, one to one
Every old address that changes needs a permanent (301) redirect to the page that replaces it — not all of them to the home page. A redirect to an unrelated page is treated much like an error.
4. Test before you switch
Run the whole old URL list against the new site before the domain moves across. Every one should land on a real page. It’s tedious, and it’s the step that saves you.
5. After launch
- Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console.
- Watch the “not found” reports for a few weeks and add any redirects you missed.
- Keep the redirects in place permanently. Old links in forums and newspapers live for years.
Done this way, a redesign keeps what the old site earned, and fans barely notice anything moved.