Redirect Map Builder: Free, Runs in Your Browser

2. Settings

Built the map? The redesign recovery plan says what to watch in Search Console for the two weeks after launch, and the guide to redirecting thousands of URLs covers when a 410 is the better answer than a redirect.

How to Use the Redirect Map Builder

Seven steps. The first two take longest, and they’re the ones that decide whether your rankings make the move.

Where to get the old URL list

Google’s site move guide points at three sources: your sitemaps, your server logs or analytics, and your CMS. Use several. Each one misses pages the others catch, and any page missing from the map turns into a 404 on launch day.

Where to get the new URL list

The new site’s XML sitemap is the cleanest source, though before launch you’ll crawl the staging site instead. If that list carries a staging hostname, set the New site address to the live domain. The check then flags every target that sits on a different host. That’s how a staging URL gets caught before it ships.

How to Read the Results

The summary says how many rows went in, how many are ready to export and what was found. Mode B adds a review table above the map check. Click any column header to sort a table, and each table has its own CSV download.

Match confidence in mode B

Each old URL is compared with the new URLs that share a word with it. But first the builder lowercases everything and strips trailing slashes, file extensions like .html and .php, stop words like the and and, date folders, and platform folders like products, collections, catalog and blog. Plurals are folded too, so socks and sock count as one word.

The score then mixes three things: how many slug words match, how close the slugs are letter by letter (so pack and backpack still score), and how much of the folder path overlaps. At 80% and up, a match is High and gets ticked for you. 60 to 79% is Medium, usually right but still worth a look. Low runs from your minimum (50% by default) to 59%. Treat it as a guess.

Below the minimum, the builder walks up the old URL’s folders and looks for the parent category on the new site. If the old parent folder is itself in your map, it borrows that match. It never falls back to the homepage. If nothing turns up, the row says No match and you choose the target.

What each check means and what to do

Which export to use

Every export is plain text, so copy it or download it as a file. The Apache file downloads as a .txt so it doesn’t vanish as a hidden dot file on your computer. Paste its contents into the real .htaccess.

Worked example: the sample data

Load the sample in mode A and 23 rows go in. 18 come out in the exports (10 OK, 2 fixed and 6 with a warning), and 5 are left out. Here are the fixed ones. /catalog/hiking-boots/acme-ridge-boot.html pointed at /products/acme-ridge-boot-v1, which the next row sends on to /products/acme-ridge-boot, so the chain is collapsed to a single hop. And the #balance fragment is stripped from the gift card URL. What’s left out? /sale/ and /collections/clearance point at each other (a loop), the size guide points at itself, one trail shoes row is an exact duplicate and the second socks row conflicts with the first. The 6 warnings are the kept socks row, two old blog posts sent to the homepage, a tents target on http://, a gaiters target carrying utm_source and a Hiking-Poles row that only changes the letter case. Switch to the Shopify export and two more notes appear: /shop/gift-guide/ starts with a prefix Shopify says it can’t redirect, and /products/acme-ridge-boot-v1 has to return a 404 before Shopify will redirect it.

Switch to mode B and load the sample. 22 old URLs from a Search Console Pages export meet a 22-URL sitemap, and 16 match with high confidence, most of them on an identical slug. acme-summit-30l-pack still scores 80% against acme-summit-30l-backpack, because the letter-level comparison sees pack inside backpack. The tent scores 70% (Medium), and shipping-and-returns.html gets 52% against the shipping policy (Low). Check that one. The refund policy may be the better home. The discontinued acme-trekker-gaiter.html scores 48%, under the 50% minimum, so the builder borrows the match of its parent folder, /collections/gaiters. /clearance/ and /product.php?id=118 get nothing, the homepage is never offered, and /pages/gift-cards is on both sites, so it needs no redirect at all.

Before you install anything, read the redesign recovery plan for the launch-day checks. If the move also merges products into variants, read the Shopify variants guide too. Shopify won’t redirect a product URL that still loads.

Limits of This Tool

• It only reads URLs. It never opens the pages, so two matching slugs can hide two different products (an old model and its replacement, say). To match on page content, you’d need a crawl of both sites.
• It doesn’t fetch anything. It can’t tell you that a new URL returns 404, that a target is redirected somewhere else on the live server, or that a host rule adds an extra hop. So crawl the old URLs in list mode after launch.
• Chains are only found inside this map. Redirects that already live on the server, in an old plugin, at a CDN or in platform defaults, aren’t visible here.
• One row, one rule. It doesn’t write regex or wildcard rules. If every /catalog/ URL maps to the same /collections/ slug, one hand-written pattern rule is shorter.
• Servers differ. The Apache and Nginx output follows the official docs, but a host can disable mod_rewrite or override .htaccess. Back up the old file and test before production.
• Vendor formats change. The Shopify, Redirection and Rank Math layouts were checked against each vendor’s docs and sample files. Still, import three rows first. Then the rest.
• Size. In testing, 5,010 pairs were checked and turned into rules in under a second in desktop Chrome. Matching 5,000 old URLs against 4,827 new ones took about 1.4 seconds, or about 3 seconds with the tables drawn. Much bigger lists still work, just slower. If the tab stalls, split them by folder.

Redirect Map Builder FAQ