How to redirect a URL in Squarespace
When should you use a redirect?
There are a couple of reasons you may want to create a redirect.
If you’ve made changes to your website, for example retired old pages or replaced them with a slightly different service, you’ll want to make sure that you redirect the old/retired page to the new one so that people don’t land on a dreaded 404 page!
If you use keywords in your url that aren’t great for your audience. For example, if you’re a florest targeting the keywords ‘pink wedding bouquet’ on your services page, the url would be www.florest.com/pink-wedding-bouquet but this may not be the best url for your audience to understand. To solve this you could create a url www.florest.com/services and redirect it to www.florest.com/pink-wedding-bouquet so that when you share the url with your audience, they understand that the page will actually list your services.
Why does it matter?
If you want to make sure you’re maximising your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) then redirects are essential to avoid broken links or keep SEO goodness linked to the old pages.
Not only that, your website will be penalised for having broken links so make sure that all urls associated with your website are directed to active pages.
How to set up a 301 redirect
You’ll see there are 301 and 302 redirects, so one which is best? 301 redirects are permanent and tell search engines that a page has permanently moved. 302 redirects are temporary redirects but honestly, I haven’t come across any situations where these are valuable. After all, if you decide to remove a 301 redirect, it by definition becomes temporary.
Thankfully, Squarespace makes it incredibly easy to set up a 301 redirect. The only thing you have to remember is that your domain must be connected to the Squarespace site for the redirect to work.
When you’re ready, you’ll need to navigate to Settings > Advanced > URL Mappings.
You‘ll then need to the url of the page you wish to redirect and that of the destination page. You can then input this into the mapping window in the following format (you don’t need to add the entire domain, just the bit after the forward slash):
/your-page-url-here -> /destination-page-here 301
For example, if I were redirecting www.example.com/grey-feathers to www.example.com/blog the redirect would look like this:
/grey-feathers -> /blog 301
If you have any questions or feedback then please get in touch.
